COVID-19 Outbreak Infects 66 At Maryland Nursing Home
While the nursing home in Kirkland, Washington, was the epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak three weeks ago, the fast-spreading virus has turned its crosshairs onto the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions.
Virus cases and deaths are erupting in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Maryland.
The hardest-hit area is New York state, which has 53,399 confirmed cases and 827 deaths as of Saturday night (March 28). Reports are pouring in that hospital systems in the region are beyond capacity, and that is the point where the mortality rate could surge unless extra capacity is brought online to alleviate the lack of hospital beds and ICU-level treatment.
At the moment, New Jersey is the second hardest-hit area with 11,124 cases and 140 deaths, next is Massachusetts with 4,257 cases and 44 deaths, then Pennsylvania with 2,845 cases and 34 deaths, and last is Maryland with 995 cases and 10 deaths.
It appears the epicenter of the virus has shifted from West Coast to East Coast. Parts of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic have densely packed metro areas with large senior populations, a dangerous combination that could lead to a further rise in cases and deaths.
With March coming to a close, the virus spread is shifting down East Coast. A new report, released by Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan on Saturday night revealed how a nursing home in the state has just confirmed 66 cases, resulting in 11 hospitalizations, reported CBS Baltimore.
.@GovLarryHogan confirmed a #CoronavirusOutbreak at the Pleasant View Nursing facility in Mt. Airy, Carroll County, MD. Hogan says 66 residents tested positive AND 11 are being hospitalized. We’re learning the facility has 104 beds/staff is being monitored. @fox5dcpic.twitter.com/wZifn6hAvL
Hogan said state and local officials are at the Pleasant View Nursing Home in Mount Airy, Maryland, located in Carroll County.
“Tonight, Maryland has experienced a tragic coronavirus outbreak at Pleasant View Nursing Home in Mount Airy. Multiple state agencies are on the scene and working closely with the local health department and the facility as they take urgent steps to protect additional residents and staff who may have been exposed.”
“As we have been warning for weeks, older Marylanders and those with underlying health conditions are more vulnerable and at a significantly higher risk of contracting this disease,” Hogan added.
The Carroll County Health Department published this memo to the public:
“Pleasant View Nursing Home continues to cooperate with and follow the guidance of the Maryland Department of Health and the Carroll County Health Department. We’re maintaining constant communication and will continue to provide resources and support to the patients, their families and facility staff during this difficult time.”
Elsewhere in the state, a fire station in Baltimore had to suspend operations after firefighters came in contact with an emergency medical services provider who tested positive for the virus.
The Maryland National Guard and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) have been setting up a large field hospital at the Baltimore Convention Center.
Here are a few photos of the medical surge site that Maryland is establishing at the Baltimore Convention Center as supplies arrive from @fema. Lots of partners from across state agencies; Feds; and private sector healthcare involved. pic.twitter.com/MSOTt3jZHq
Maryland National Guard is assembling a field hospital today including 250 beds at the Baltimore Convention Center. This is part of the effort to add thousands of hospital beds for #Covid_19pic.twitter.com/Hg4NX7H69A
MD National Guard humvees were seen in Baltimore, but the Guard says “there is not a threat of martial law…If you see a @MDNG Humvee on your street, know we are helping someone in need!” https://t.co/IayE27tzucpic.twitter.com/TVgUrSqgd5
West Faces “Social Bomb” As Pandemic Sparks Unrest Among Poorest
The next phase of the COVID-19 pandemic could be a flare-up of social unrest across major Western cities as millions have lost their jobs, economies have crashed into depressions, and the military is being called up to maintain order.
The Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) warned that riots could be imminent in low-income neighborhoods as extreme wealth inequality has left households unprepared and without a cash buffer to weather the economic downturn.
As we’ve noted before, many Western households were already stretched thin before the shutdowns began, with little savings, insurmountable debts, and the lack of access to proper healthcare. Now, these folks, which many have been laid off from gig-economy and service sector jobs, have zero income and could be emotionally motivated to hit the streets and protest.
IFRC president Francesco Rocca warned on Friday during a press conference that social unrest could be imminent in Italy, reported Reuters.
“We have a lot of people who are living very marginalized, in the so-called black hole of society… In the most difficult neighborhoods of the biggest cities, I am afraid that in a few weeks, we will have social problems,” Rocca said.
“This is a social bomb that can explode at any moment, because they don’t have any way to have an income,” he said, whose agency deploys volunteers across Europe, including in Italy, Spain, and France.
He warned that the largest Western cities have only a ‘few weeks’ before social unrest is seen.
As for the US, President Trump has been deploying National Guard units across the country to fight the virus, or a perfect cover to prepare for Martial law-style shutdowns across some areas where the virus is hard-hitting.
President Trump, on Saturday afternoon, said he is considering a quarantine in the New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut area, which would likely be enforced by the military to some degree.
We have noted that National Guard armored vehicles have already been spotted across the country and have suggested that troops are being positioned around major US metros to maintain order if social unrest was seen in low-income neighborhoods.
The Western world is on the brink of turmoil. The dominos are already falling with crashing economies in Europe and the US, triggering massive job losses that could soon lead to the unraveling of social fabric.
Governments offering universal basic income as a solution to keep their citizens content won’t work this time. The West is headed for a period of instability, not just economically, but socially.
#Gun stores are considered a non-essential business in #LA County,however, several shops in the area have remained open&are seeing more first-time buyers. Outside a #gunstore in Burbank,Calif.,several gun buyers say they are preparing for“uncertain times.” pic.twitter.com/OgCE1j15aQ
@JohnCarneyDE Why are the gun stores still open? There is a long line of people at the gun store on north route 13 near the 13/40 split. pic.twitter.com/uTI9UGkceH
Long lines outside a Pasadena gun store. (This is maybe 1/4 of the line, which stretched around the corner.) Folks at the pet shop where I was said it had been like that for a week, with the line forming around 5:30 a.m. pic.twitter.com/DjX7eVbuc1
A top government official in France has admitted that draconian lockdown measures being imposed on the rest of the population shouldn’t be implemented in the country’s migrant-heavy ghettos in order to prevent riots.
In a letter leaked to magazine Le Canard Enchaine, French Secretary of State to the Ministry of the Interior Laurent Nunez advises, “It is not a priority to enforce closings in certain neighborhoods and to stop gatherings.”
In a separate video conference call, Nunez told other officials that restricting movement and shutting down shops in France’s infamous banlieues risks igniting violent social disorder if enforced too rigorously.
A regional defense zone prefect who was in on the call agreed that businesses that had been closed down in other areas of France should remain open in poorer neighborhoods in order to help with “social mediation.”
“This undermining of the laws that Macron declared as essential, this clear disregard for the population as a whole, comes at a time when police, ambulance and firefighters face record levels of hostility when they venture into the suburbs where gangs set cars on fire then attack them when they arrive to help,”writes Damian Wilson.
As is illustrated in the clip below, whenever police attempt to enforce quarantine measures, or indeed any other act of law enforcement, in migrant-heavy areas, they are immediately surrounded and intimidated by gangs of migrants. It’s not uncommon for fire trucks and ambulances to be attacked in these “sensitive” areas.
Threat Alert in Paris, France…
Migrants attack police and refuse to comply with Chinese Coronavirus Quarantine – just like in Germany!
It is delusional to think that these individual will EVER comply with ANY rules -Globalists already new this.
As Breitbart reports, migrants in European cities across the continent simply do not respect the lockdown or the police officers trying to enforce it.
Police in the migrant area of Seine-Saint-Denis in Paris say they are overwhelmed by the number of people who refuse to stay indoors.
“We are not going to give up. But we also know where these people live and how they live. Strict containment, for them, is just impossible,” one officer explained.
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Don’t Look Now But The People Responsible For The World’s Food Supply Are Starting To Get Sick
Sanderson Farms, a large poultry manufacturer and Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pork producer, have both reported their first couple of positive cases of coronavirus.
This raises the obvious question: what happens when people critical to the world’s food supply start to fall ill?
As of now, there has been no such disruption – but it is beginning to morph into a massive threat, Bloomberg notes, with workers in close quarters preparing and processing food globally. Aside from the obvious threat of food not making it to consumers, things like fruits may also wind up rotting in fields if there aren’t enough workers to pick and cultivate them.
Al Stehly, who operates a farm-management business in California’s North San Diego County said: “If we can’t flatten the curve, then that is going to affect farmers and farm laborers — and then we have to make choices about which crops we harvest and which ones we don’t. We hope no one gets sick. But I would expect some of us are going to get the virus.”
And to clarify, it’s not the food itself that causes the threat of the virus. It’s the supply chain disruption that the virus can cause with workers.
Sanderson was lucky in the sense that their one worker only worked at a small table by themselves. But other infections in the industry, where workers are closer together, could wreak more havoc. At some beef plants, workers are “elbow to elbow” and despite the employees wearing protective gear, there still remains risk of contagion.
Dave MacLennan, chief executive officer of Cargill Inc., the world’s largest agricultural commodities trader said: “One of our beef plants feeds 22 million people per day, so it’s vital that these plants stay open.”
Thomas Hesse, president of United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 401 said: “There’s underlying tension, there’s fear and there’s anxiety.”
And so, as grocery shelves go empty around the globe, food processing companies have stepped up their sanitary procedures, including more hand washing, spraying down plants and wiping down door knobs. Shifts are becoming more staggered and lunch breaks are now taken alone.
Steve Cahillane, CEO of Kellogg Co., has suggested his company will bring in additional workers, if needed, as part of a “mitigation plan”.
Mary Coppola of the United Fresh Produce Association said: “We’re going to see some creative solutions where folks that are being laid off are going to be able to find new opportunities that continue to support the essential critical infrastructure.”
But luring people into the food processing industry may not be as easy as it sounds, especially as the government is mailing people checks specifically to prevent them from going to work. Wages in the industry are generally low and the labor is described as “back-breaking”.
While some major producers have been issuing bonuses or increased pay to their workers to let them know they are appreciated, Vermont dairy farmers have implemented other unusual backup plans. In a call through social media, they simply asked for people to come milk cows if farmers start to get sick. They signed up 80 volunteers as standbys.
Kim Mercer of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont said: “It started when we got a couple of calls from dairy farmers who were super worried they might get sick and wouldn’t be able to milk their cows, and that would be it — they’d lose their farms. We now have people everywhere all across the state who are ready to go.”
We’re not sure other major food producers will be as lucky…
The Chinese Communist Party is the “central threat of our times”, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo astutely said in January. Back then, coronavirus was already spreading throughout China and over the world; the Communist Party’s attempt to hide the epidemic proved that Pompeo was more than right.
“My concern is that this cover-up, this disinformation that the Chinese Communist Party is engaged in, is still denying the world the information it needs so that we can prevent further cases or something like this from recurring again”, Pompeo added this week.
Had China responded to the outbreak three weeks earlier than it did, cases of coronavirus could have been reduced by 95%, according to a study by the University of Southampton. In those three weeks, China was busy hiding the truth. According to Steve Tsang, director of the University of London’s SOAS China Institute, “It is the cover-up of the Communist Party for the first two months or so which created conditions to generate a global pandemic”.
Chinese leaders, however, seemed obsessed only with the sustainability of their totalitarian regime, and as eager to silence any criticism as they have been in the past. Since January, the evidence of China’s deliberate cover-up of the coronavirus in Wuhan has become a matter of public record. The Chinese government censored and detained brave doctors and whistleblowers who attempted to sound the alarm. One of China’s richest entrepreneurs, Jack Ma, recently disclosed that China hid at least one-third of the coronavirus cases.
China has been able to grow into a superpower because it adopted economic practices from the West. No other country ever achieved such rapid economic and social progress for such a sustained period of time. However, hopes placed by the West in the Chinese market also nourished a dangerous mirage. We in the West thought that a modernizing China with a rising GDP would also democratize and come to respect transparency, pluralism and human rights. Instead, the mirage turned into a disaster as we watched China become even more of a “totalitarian state“.
The nature of the Chinese regime — its ban on the free press and all critical voices; the absolute domination of the Communist Party over social, spiritual and economic actors; imprisoning minorities and crushing freedom of conscience — is also contributing to the emergence of this public health disaster. The cost, in terms of human lives and world’s GDP, is immense.
The Chinese government’s complicity in the pandemic is now an opportunity for the West to reevaluate its ties to Beijing. According to Guy Sorman, a French-American expert on China:
“Like useful idiots, we have not only helped the Party prosper but, even worse, we have given up on our humanitarian, democratic, and spiritual values in doing so.”
“It is time”, stated the American columnist, Marc A. Thiessen, “to immunize our economy and national security from our dependence on a deceitful regime”.
China is waging a double information war: one abroad and one for its own public, both led by the Chinese authorities with President Xi Jinping at its head. They apparently see the West as weak and submissive. We have been.
China seems to believe that it is rising, while the West is in decline. “We find ourselves in what Germans call a Systemwettbewerb, a ‘competition of systems’ between liberal democracies and China’s authoritarian state capitalism, which is increasingly projecting its absolute claim to power beyond its borders”, said Thorsten Benner, co-founder and director of the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin. The Cold War with Russia was clearer.
“We had an ideological and security antagonist who was not an economic competitor. There was a Chinese wall between the economies of the West and the Soviet Union. Today, we are confronted with an opponent who is a powerful economic competitor and intricately involved in the political economy of the West. At the same time, we also depend on cooperation with China on transnational issues such as climate change and pandemics. China’s authoritarian state capitalist system with its hegemonic ambitions is by far the most difficult strategic challenge the West has faced to date”.
According to historian Niall Ferguson, “China today poses a bigger economic challenge than the Soviet Union ever did”. The Soviet Union could never rely on a dynamic private sector, as China is doing. In some markets — such as technology — China is already ahead of the United States. Not only that; the Chinese economy, the world’s second-largest, is more closely integrated with the West than the Soviet one ever was. China’s totalitarian one-party rule allows greater personal freedoms, at least at the moment, than the Soviet Union did. The coronavirus epidemic is, in fact, partly a consequence of the freedom of movement Chinese citizens enjoy.
China has also been able to convince much of the West that it is not an enemy. Beijing’s goal has appeared to be to try to draw the West — and the rest of the world — into its economic and ideological orbit. China opened markets in the West while it offered to its own people a kind of devil’s bargain: give up your ideas and principles and you will enjoy material improvement and societal security. Meanwhile, China became an industrial and technological behemoth, a feat the Soviet Union could only dream about.
Consider, for instance, pharmaceuticals. According to Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, Chinese companies supply the US with more than 90% of its antibiotics, vitamin C and ibuprofen, as well as 70% of acetaminophen and 40-45% of heparin. The US was never dependent on the Soviet Union for that.
In an article in Xinhua, one of the Chinese Communist Party’s mouthpieces, Beijing threatened to halt pharmaceutical exports, after which the US would be “plunged into the mighty sea of coronavirus”. The Xinhua article was actually entitled, “Be bold: the world owes China a thank you.”
Fox News host Tucker Carlson was right to blast members of the American elite for selling out their country to Chinese economic interests.
China’s leaders are probably hoping that you cannot challenge a powerhouse that is selling you most of your vital medications.
Italy, a country hit hard by China’s coronavirus pandemic, is now at the center of a strategic Chinese propaganda campaign. Beijing has sent doctors and supplies to Italy and is doing the same all over Europe. In Italy, you can see posters saying, “Go, China!” [“Forza China!“] China is trying to buy our silence and complicity. Sadly, that is already taking place. In February, while some Italian officials (on the political right) were urging Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte to quarantine schoolchildren in the north who were just returning from holidays in China, Italy’s highest officials were busy trying to please Beijing. Italy’s President, Sergio Mattarella; Minister for Culture, Dario Franceschini, and Minister for Foreign Affairs, Luigi Di Maio, hosted a concert in Rome for “Italian-Chinese friendship“. China’s President Xi Jinping warmly thanked them.
China is not helping at this point out of “solidarity”. The Chinese regime is now seeking to portray itself as the world’s savior. Beijing, at the beginning of the pandemic, did not care about the lives of even its own people: it was busy censoring the news.
“Hidden behind declarations of solidarity, China plans to buy out our troubled companies and infrastructure”,according to Germany’s leading newspaper, Bild. Italy was the first G-7 country to sign up for China’s global investment program, a deal that rightly raised concerns in the US. China seems to be ready to continue its expansion into the Italy’s economy and strategic interests.
China’s Communist Party also seems to be at war with the free flow of information internationally. The regime, in the most sweeping media ejection from China since the death of Mao Zedong, recently expelled US journalists. Beijing has also tried to shift the blame for the pandemic to the US by saying that coronavirus originated with US military personnel in Wuhan. Lijian Zhao, spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry, posted statements to that effect on Chinese social media and Twitter. The coronavirus crisis is now a battleground for Chinese propaganda.
The paradox is that the Global Times, a media outlet of the Chinese Communist Party, spreads false anti-US propaganda on Twitter, which is banned in China. Twitter, meanwhile, banned the website Zero Hedge, for publishing an article linking a Chinese scientist to the outbreak of coronavirus. Twitter also unfortunately decided that China’s Communist Party does not violate the rules of social media by spreading lies against the US.
Already a few years ago, in 2013, a secret Chinese Communist Party directive known as Document No. 9 called for the rejection of seven Western ideas, such as “Western constitutional democracy”, “universal values” of human rights, Western-inspired notions of media independence and civic participation, ardently pro-market “neo-liberalism,” and “nihilist” criticisms of the Party’s questionable past. Targets to combat included “Western embassies, consulates, media operations and nongovernmental organizations”. Huang Kunming, the Party’s propaganda chief, attacks “some Western countries who use their technological advantages and dominance of discourse that they have accumulated over a long period to peddle so-called ‘universal values'”. China’s Education Minister Yuan Guiren, a former president of Beijing Normal University, threw in: “Never let textbooks promoting Western values appear in our classes”.
In speeches and official documents, the President Xi talks about a struggle between “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and “Western anti-China forces” with their “extremely malicious” ideas of freedom, democracy and human rights. The West seems to be their target. According to a new study by the International Republican Institute:
“The Chinese Communist Party… is employing a unique set of tactics in the economic and information domains that undermines many developing countries’ democratic institutions and future prosperity as their dependence on China grows.”
China evidently understands how to use Western media for its own propaganda. “The Vatican and the Western business elite”, wrote Michael Brendan Dougherty, “once instrumental in the West’s winning the Cold War, have been brought to heel by the Chinese Communist party”. The Chinese regime has succeeded where the Soviet regime failed. Last December, a six-year-old girl in London preparing Christmas cards found a message inside: “We are foreign prisoners in Shanghai Qingpu Prison China, forced to work against our will”, read the handwritten note. “Please help us and notify human rights organization”. Western capitalism has even become complicit with Chinese slavery.
Western brands are not alone in caving in out of fear of “offending” the Communist Party. Western culture has been eagerly submitting itself to self-censorship about China. “The West is so tolerant, passive, accommodating and naive towards Beijing,” said Liao Yiwu, a Chinese writer exiled in Berlin.
“Westerners look at China with incredulous eyes, they are seduced like an old man in front of a young girl. Everyone trembles before Chinese omnipotence. Europe shows all its weakness. It does not realize that the Chinese offensive threatens its freedom and values”.
China’s embassy in the Czech Republic is now financing a study course at Charles University, the most prestigious in the country. British universities are today largely dependent on Chinese students; conservative estimates put their combined tuition fees at about $1.75 billion. Australia is now even more reliant, with 200,000 Chinese students. If they go back to China or if Chinese donations stop coming to these faculties, they stand to lose about $4 billion.
The 1,500 branches of the Confucius Institute that China’s regime has established in 140 countries offer language and “cultural” programs. However, according to Matt Schrader, a China analyst with the Alliance for Securing Democracy, these institutes are “propaganda tools“. Last October, Belgium banned the head of Confucius Institute in Brussels, Xinning Song, after security services accused him of spying for Beijing.
In 2013, when the University of Sydney shut down a talk by Tibet’s Dalai Lama on campus, many saw the university’s links to Chinese interests as being involved in the lobbying efforts to stop the previously approved event. Topics such as Tibet, Taiwan independence, or the dissident Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, are taboo.
According to a Bloomberg report, China is also infiltrating Europe’s political landscape by supporting political parties and inviting politicians to China. President Xi, taking his ideological battle abroad, even donated a statue of Karl Marx to his German hometown Trier on the 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth.
Beijing, unsurprisingly, has been using Western multilateral institutions to its own advantage. As Michael Collins detailed in a report for the Council on Foreign Relations, Beijing has expanded its presence in the World Health Organization. “China’s WHO contributions have grown by 52% since 2014 to approximately $86 million”, Collins states.
“This is largely due to China’s increase in assessed contributions which are based on a country’s economic development and population. However, China has also slightly increased voluntary contributions from $8.7 million in 2014 to approximately $10.2 million in 2019”.
Like the former Soviet Union, China now seems to be building a giant apparatus of control. They call it the “Internet police“. Try to imagine the former East Germany’s secret police, the Stasi, using the most advanced surveillance system in the world: This is China in 2020.
Communist dictatorships always end up following the same script. The Soviet writer Boris Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature but the communist regime prevented him from receiving it. In China, literary critic, writer, poet, and human rights activist Liu Xiaobo was awarded Nobel Prize for Peace but was never able to receive it: he died under guard in a Chinese hospital. The Soviet Union had forced-labor camps just as China does. Chinese dissident Harry Wu, who endured 19 years in jail, compared the Chinese camps (laogai) to the Soviet gulag and Nazi concentration camps.
In the Soviet Union, writers, politicians, generals and doctors who were silenced and executed under Stalin, were later “rehabilitated” by the Soviet leaders after Stalin’s death. The Chinese Communist Party just “exonerated” Dr. Li Wenliang who warned about the coronavirus outbreak. He was accused of “making false comments and disturbing the social order”, then forced to recant, and soon after, at the age of 33, died of the disease. It is a shameful attempt by the Chinese officials to whitewash their own image.
In a column last week for the Spanish daily El Pais, the Nobel Laureate Mario Vargas Llosa wrote about coronavirus:
“Nobody seems to be warning that none of this could have happened in the world if popular China were a free country and democratic rather than a dictatorship”.
Vargas Llosa then likened the epidemic outbreak to Russia’s Chernobyl disaster during the Soviet era. Both dictatorships censored and silenced information about the crises. In response, Beijing’s regime not only called Vargas Llosa “irresponsible“, but also banned his books from Chinese e-book platforms. Vargas Llosa has warned Western “fools” not to believe in China, “the free market with a political dictatorship”, and that “what happened with the coronavirus should open the eyes of the blind”.
The risk now is that, instead of Chernobyl which led, in part, to Soviet Union’s downfall, China’s communist regime will enjoy reinforcement — especially if, due to the coronavirus crisis, the American people in November fail to support the first president in the last 40 years who has openly challenged China.
The Western dream of a “renaissance of the Chinese nation” has now turned into a globalized nightmare. Hundreds of millions across the world are in lockdown; thousands are dead; the economies of Western countries are paralyzed, with some on the verge of collapse. Empty shops and streets are commonplace.
This might be what analysts call “the end of liberal order“. China’s communists today are more capitalist than Marxist, at least at the state level. President Xi has adopted “market Leninism” – mixing a state-run economy with a “terrifying form of totalitarianism“. The West needs to wake up to China’s duplicity.
The ongoing and unfolding reactions to the Coronavirus look set to have wide-ranging and long-lasting effect on politics, society and economics. The drive to close down all activities is extraordinary as are the measures being promoted to isolate people from each other.
The deep-rooted fear of contagious disease, hardwired into the collective consciousness by historical events such as the ‘Black/Bubonic Plague’ and maintained through popular culture (e.g. the Hollywood movies Outbreak and Contagion), means that people are without question highly susceptible to accepting extreme emergency measures whether or not such measures are rational or justified. The New York Times called for America to be put on a war footing in order to deal with Corona whilst former Army General Stanley McChrystal has been invoking his 9/11 experience in order to prescribe lessons for today’s leaders.
At the same time, political actors are fully aware that these conditions of fear and panic provide a critical opportunity that can be exploited in order to pursue political, economic and societal objectives. It is very likely, however, that the dangers posed by the potential exploitation of Corona for broader political, economic and societal objectives latter far outweigh the immediate threat to life and health from the virus. A lesson from recent history is instructive here.
9/11 AND THE GLOBAL ‘WAR ON TERROR’
The events of September 11 2001 represent a key moment in contemporary history. The destruction of three skyscrapers in New York after the impact of two airliners and an attack on the Pentagon, killing around 3000 civilians, shocked both American and global publics. The horror of seeing aircraft being flown into buildings, followed by the total destruction of three high rise buildings within a matter of seconds, and the spectre of a shadowy band of Islamic fundamentalists (Al Qaeda) having pulled off such devastating attacks, gripped the imagination of many in the Western world.
It was in this climate of paranoia and fear that extraordinary policies were implemented. The USA Patriot Act led to significant civil liberty restrictions whilst the mass surveillance of the digital environment became normalized.
In the United States torture was authorized in the name of preventing terrorism whilst the Guantanamo Bay facility in Cuba became a site in which accused individuals have been held without any adequate legal protection or due process.
Remarkably, the individual accused of leading the alleged 9/11 plot, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who ‘confessed’ to CIA interrogators after being ‘waterboarded’ 183 times, has recently received his trial date, set for January 11 2021 and 20 years after 9/11. Civil liberty restrictions, mass surveillance and torture were only a sub-strand of the major war-fighting-policy that was enabled by 9/11.
Presented at the time as America’s ‘New Pearl Harbour’, 9/11 provided the conditions for a series of major regime-change wars which persist until today.
Critically, these wars have not been primarily about combatting ‘Islamic fundamentalist terrorism’/Al Qaeda, but rather attacking ‘enemy’ states. Indeed, the evidence that the 9/11 event and the alleged threat of ‘Islamic fundamentalist’ was then exploited in order to pursue a geo-politically motivated set of regime-change wars which had little connection to the purported Al Qaeda threat is well established.
Former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, Wesley Clark, famously went public in 2006/7 stating that immediately after 9/11 he had been informed that the US was intending to attack seven countries within five years including Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan and Iran. Clark stated:
He [the Joint Staff officer] picked up a piece of paper, he said I just got this down from upstairs, from the Secretary of Defence’s office today, and he said this is a memo that describes how we are gonna take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finishing off Iran.
Clark’s claims have recently been corroborated by retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson (chief of staff to Colin Powell and Iraq War planner) who stated that he had actually seen the same plans Clark was referring to many months prior to 9/11:
My first briefing in the Pentagon from an Air Force three-star general in February of 2001 I almost fell of my chair because their briefing included on the one hand the Air Force’s ability to take out 80 to 90% of the targets in North Korea in the first few hours of an aerial strike on that country to hey when we do Iraq we’re gonna do Syria and Lebanon and we’re going to do Iran and maybe Egypt … but this was more than that [just contingency planning] Wes Clark is right they had these plans they were going to go right through all these countries that they felt threatened Israel all through those countries that they felt threatened 25-30% of the world’s oil passing through the Strait of Hormuz.
Documentary evidence for these claims has come by way of the UK Chilcot Inquiry into the 2003 Iraq War. For example, a report quoted a British embassy cable, dated 15 September 2001, explained that ‘[t]he “regime-change hawks” in Washington are arguing that a coalition put together for one purpose [against international terrorism] could be used to clear up other problems in the region.’ Another document released by Chilcot shows British Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President George Bush discussing phases one and two of the ‘war on terror’ and when to hit particular countries. Blair writes:
If toppling Saddam is a prime objective, it is far easier to do it with Syria and Iran in favour or acquiescing rather than hitting all three at once.
The regime-change wars that have flowed directly and indirectly from 9/11 continue to this day. War and conflict continues in Afghanistan and Iraq whilst the nine-year-long war in Syria has borne witness to extensive and illegal policies pursued by Western governments including the funding and arming of extremist groups coupled with support for groups actually aligned with Al Qaeda. Iran continues to be subjected to US hybrid warfare tactics including sanctions and covert operations whilst the threat of military action is very clear and present.
The human cost of these wars, built upon the ruthless exploitation of public fear of terrorism in order to pursue multiple ‘regime-change’ wars, has been huge. According to the Brown University ‘Costs of War Project’, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have killed a combined 480,000 to 507,000 civilians, coalition military members, and foreign fighters, with an untold number having been maimed and disfigured. IPPNW estimated that the first ten years of the ‘war on terror’ in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan killed 1.3 million people.
Since 2011, in Syria alone, over 400,000 people have died as a result of war. The numbers of people displaced as a result of these conflicts are also extremely high; wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Syria have wrought a combined 9.39 million refugees, 10.78 million internally displaced peoples, and 830,000 asylum seekers. In addition, there are persisting and very serious concerns with respect to the possible involvement of state actors with the event of 9/11.
Overall, the 9/11 global ‘war on terror’ is increasingly coming to be understood particularly across the world as, first and foremost, a remarkable propaganda campaign designed to enable violent conflict in the international system and with its effects and objectives being far wider and deeper than had been suggested by official narratives regarding the need to combat Al Qaeda.
CORONA VIRUS: A NEW 9/11?
The lesson of 9/11 is that major events can become what scholar Peter Dale Scott describes as deep events which are exploited by political actors in order to precipitate and manage major political, economic and social shifts. 9/11 became, in effect, the deep event that enabled 20 years of unfettered Western warfare abroad and severe civil liberty restrictions and extensive surveillance at home.
At the time of 9/11 many people in the West were terrified of terrorism. Public opposition to the invasion of Afghanistan (the first regime war to flow within months of 9/11) was almost impossible without being accused of being reckless in the ‘fight against terrorism’ or of being an ‘Al Qaeda’ sympathizer. Muslims throughout the West were widely despised. US President George Bush declared that ‘you are either with us or against us’. The parallels with what is happening today are obvious.
Is the Coronavirus a new 9/11, a new deep event? We cannot yet be sure, as of this writing. Perhaps the current strategy of suspending basic liberties will work to effectively eliminate all threats posed by the virus. Governments will then restore the civil liberties currently being suspended and all will fairly quickly return to the way things were before. Perhaps the economy will confidently weather the fallout from the ‘lockdowns’ and everything will return to business as usual.
And perhaps a sober ‘lessons learned’ review will lead to public health officials developing reasonable and balanced plans, such as developing sufficient capacity for rapid testing and tracing, which can be deployed the next time a sufficiently dangerous virus starts to spread thus avoiding terrifying publics and implementing draconian measures that inflict significant damage to the social and economic fabric of society.
Or perhaps not. It may be that, as British journalist Peter Hitchens has been warning, the loss of liberty and basic rights will continue indefinitely as governments greedily hold on to their increased powers of control over their citizenry.
Similarly, Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi has warned about the risks in Italy of state authorities, hostile to open societies and the political left, exploiting Corona in order to increase their control.
An obvious concern here is whether there will be a permanent impact on mass gatherings and protests. James Corbett warns of a permanent state of ‘medical martial law’ and there is certainly the very real possibility of the normalization of government-imposed quarantine and other freedom of movement restrictions.
Margaret Kimberley of the US-based Black Agenda Report warns that Corona may be used as a way of covering up both economic crisis and collapse. She notes that the Federal Reserve ‘recently threw Wall Street a $1.5 trillion lifeline which only kicked the can down the road. The can has been kicked ever since the Great Recession of 2008’. The likely destruction of small businesses might allow for ever greater corporate choke-hold on the economy with more people forced into the corporate workforce.
There is certainly the danger that COVID-19 will be exploited in order to distract from severe economic problems whilst also enabling the pursuit of new economic strategies which worsen rather than mitigate the social inequalities that already tarnish Western countries.
And, of course those actors behind the regime-change wars that flowed from 9/11 may use the Coronavirus to increase pressure on the countries they have been targeting for the last 20 years and those they wish to target in the future.
ABC news report that, despite the Coronavirus, US and UAE troops have held a major military exercise ‘that saw forces seize a sprawling model Mideast city’. It is also worth nothing here the recent US assassination of Iranian General Solemeni and the on-going proxy battles between US forces and Iranian-backed groups in Iraq. The possibility of Corona being exploited in order to further the regime change wars we have seen over the last 20 years is extremely likely and it would be naïve in the extreme to think otherwise.
Whatever the COVID-19 event may or may not be, the fundamental lesson of the last 20 years is that governments can and do exploit, even manipulate, events in order to pursue political, social, military and economic objectives. Fearful populations are frequently irrational ones, vulnerable and malleable. Now is not the time for deference to authority and reluctance to speak out.
It is time for publics to get informed, think calmly and rationally, and to robustly scrutinize and challenge what their governments are doing. The dangers of failing to do this likely far surpass the immediate threat posed by the Coronavirus.
China Suffers Economic Double-Whammy As Current Global Demand Collapse Follows Earlier Supply Crash
As the first quarter is about to close, many Chinese factories are still operating below full capacity, have been gradually ramping up production over the last several weeks as government data suggests the country’s pandemic curve has flattened.
But as Bloomberg notes, there is a serious problem developing, one where the virus crisis is locking down the Western Hemisphere, has resulted in firms from Europe and the US to cancel their Chinese orders en masse, triggering the second shockwave that is starting to decimate China’s industrial base.
A manager from Shandong Pangu Industrial Co. told Bloomberg that 60% of their orders go to Europe. In recent weeks, manager Grace Gao warned that European clients are requesting orders to be delayed or canceled because of the virus crisis unfolding across the continent.
“It’s a complete, dramatic turnaround,” Gao said, estimating that sales in April to May could plunge by 40% over the prior year. “Last month, it was our customers who chased after us checking if we could still deliver goods as planned. Now it’s become us chasing after them asking if we should still deliver products as they ordered.”
A twin shock has emerged, one where China shuttering most of its industrial base from mid-January through early March, generated a supply shock. Now, as those Chinese firms add capacity, expecting to be met with a surge in demand from Western companies, that is not the case and is resulting in a demand shock.
“It is definitely the second shockwave for the Chinese economy,” said Xing Zhaopeng, an economist at Australia & New Zealand Banking Group. The pandemic across the world “will affect China manufacturing through two channels: disrupted supply chains and declining external demand.”
With orders canceled, supply chains disrupted, and payments delayed – the road to recovery in China is going to be a bumpy one at best. Overly optimistic analysts who have been touting a V-shape recovery in China, thus the world, in the first half of the year, will likely be wrong, and as we’ve explained several times, the best case is a U-shape or even perhaps an L-shape.
“Manufacturers are seeing many cases where overseas clients regretted their orders or where goods can’t be delivered due to customs closures in other countries,” said Dong Liu, vice president of Fujian Strait Textile Technology Co. in southeastern China. Liu’s factory was on the cusp of resuming full capacity this month until a demand shock severely dented export orders.
Nomura International HK Ltd warned earlier this week that China could be on the verge of “plummeting export growth in the coming months.”
We noted on Friday morning that Chinese industrial profits crashed the most on record in January-February, due mostly because of the Lunar new year holiday, coupled with the virus outbreak and strict social distancing measures implemented by the government. This means many Chinese firms are struggling to survive, running out of cash, and on the brink of bankruptcy as demand from abroad has collapsed.
In Keqiao, Shaoxing, a district known for textile manufacturing, many firms are in rough shape after several months of shuttering operations. Have now been greeted with a collapse in demand, thwarting any hope that full capacity can arrive in the coming weeks.
The twin shocks, first being a supply shock, originating from shutdowns in China, then a demand shock, now coming from the Western world, is the evolution of the global economic crash that is unfolding right in front of us. The world is headed for a depression, if not already in one, as central banks are frantically deploying MMT and unleashing helicopter money to save the world.
The coronavirus outbreak is proving to be the Trojan horse that justifies increased digital surveillance via our smartphones.
All over the world, starting with China – the suspected origin of the COVID-19 outbreak – governments are increasing surveillance of citizens using their smartphones. The trend is taking off like wildfire; in China citizens now require a smartphone application’s permission to travel around the country and internationally.
The application is AliPay by Ant Financial, the finance affiliate controlled by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. co-founder Jack Ma, and Tencent Holdings Ltd.’s WeChat. Citizens now require a green health code to travel, Yahoo News reported.
China isn’t the only country looking towards smartphones to monitor their citizens; Israel and Poland have also implemented their own spying to monitor those suspected or confirmed to be infected with the COVID-19 virus. Israel has gone the more extreme route, and has now given itself authority to surveil any citizen without a court warrant. Poland on the other hand is requiring those diagnosed with COVID-19 ordered to self-isolate to send authorities a selfie using an app. Which, if Poles don’t respond back in 20 minutes with a smiling face, they risk a visit from police, Dailymail reported.
Meanwhile, here in the U.S. as reported by the Washington Post, smartphones are being used by a variety of companies to “anonymously” collect user data and track if social distancing orders are being adhered to. Beyond that, the mobile phone industry is discussing how to monitor the spread of COVID-19. If that’s not enough, as this author reported for The Mind Unleashed, the government wants to work with big social tech giants like Google, Facebook, and others, to track the spread of COVID-19.
A new live index shows the increase of the police state by Top10VPN, a Digital Rights group. Top10VPN lists a total of 15 countries which have already started measures to track the phones of coronavirus patients, ranging from anonymized aggregated data to monitor the movement of people more generally, to the tracking of individual suspected patients and their contacts, known as “contact tracing.”
That’s not the only live index, a company called Unacast that collects and analyzes phone GPS location data also launched one. Except this is a “Social Distancing Scoreboard” that grades, county by county, monitoring who is following social distancing rules.
As Activist Post previously wrote while discussing the increase of a police surveillance state, these measures being put into place now will likely remain long after the pandemic has stopped and the virus has run its course. That’s the everlasting effect that COVID-19 will have on our society. The coronavirus is now classified as a pandemic by the World Health Organization, and it may very well be a legitimate health concern for all of us around the world. But it’s the government’s response that should worry us all more in the long run.
At the time of this report the COVID-19 virus has infected 640,589, killed 29,848, while 137,270 have recoveredaccording to the Johns Hopkins map.
The body of Thomas Schäfer – finance minister of the German state of Hesse, was found lying across high-speed train tracks in the town of Hochheim, located between Frankfurt and Mainz, according to DW, citing local police.
Schäfer’s remains were initially unable to be identified due to the extent of the injuries after witnesses reported the body.
According to media in the state of Hesse, the 54-year-old regularly appeared in public in recent days, for example, to inform the public about financial assistance during the coronavirus crisis. Schäfer had been finance minister of Hesse for almost 10 years
The state premier of Hesse, Volker Bouffier, said in a statement Saturday that the state’s leadership has received the news with “sadness and disbelief.” –DW
“We are all shocked and can hardly believe,” he died “so suddenly and unexpectedly” said Bouffier, adding “Our sincere condolences go to his closest relatives.”
Schäfer isn’t the only high-profile German to meet his end on train tracks.
In 2009, 74-year-old billionaire Adolf Merckle committed suicide after pushing his business empire to the edge of ruin with a speculative bet on Volkswagen stock that went wrong. He was found dead on railroad tracks near his villa in the southern German hamlet of Blaubeuren.
Merckle lost hundreds of millions of euros after he was “caught in a brief but ferocious speculative riptide linked to a campaign by Porsche, the sports car manufacturer, to seize control of Volkswagen,” reported the New York Times at the time. As a result, he was facing a massive liquidation of his empire to cover the bad bet.
Global Pandemic Preparedness – Which Country Is The Most (And Least) Ready For COVID-19?
The world has experienced many pandemics throughout its history, but not every era has had the benefit of modern medicine and hindsight.
However, as Visual Capitalist’s Nichaolas LePan notes, even with the readily available medical expertise and equipment that exists today, it is still unevenly distributed throughout the globe. Combine this with a highly interconnected global economy, and large populations are still at risk from infection.
Today’s chart pulls data from the 2019 Global Health Security Index, which ranks 195 countries on health security. It reveals that while there were top performers, healthcare systems around the world on average are fundamentally weak – and not prepared for new disease outbreaks.
Pathways for Commerce and Disease
Modern transportation and trade have linked the farthest stretches of the world to fuel a global economy. Physical distance plays less a limiting role and more an enabling one to form a flat world as Thomas Friedman put it, creating opportunities for commerce anywhere in the world.
A person can sell dishware from his home in Cusco, Peru, online to a customer in Muncie, Indiana, with products manufactured in China, from materials sourced in Africa.
While these connections sound sterile, there are people interacting with one another to procure, manufacture, package, and distribute the goods. The connections are not just through products, but also people and animals across many borders.
Now, add up the interactions within the global food supply chain with plants and livestock and tourism industries and place them under the pressures of climate change, urbanization, international mass displacement, and migration—and the volume and variety of opportunities for disease transmission and mutation becomes infinite.
The same pathways of global commerce become the transmission vectors for disease. A cough in Dubai can become a fever in London with one flight and one day.
You Cannot Manage What You Do Not Measure
Despite this, we still live with national healthcare systems that look inward towards national populations, with less of a focus on integrating what is happening with the outside world.
The Global Health Security (GHS) Index is the first comprehensive effort to assess and benchmark health security and related capabilities by nation, and it tracks six key factors to come up with an overall score for each of the 195 countries in the ranking:
Prevention
Prevention of the emergence or release of pathogens
Detection and Reporting
Early detection and reporting for epidemics of potential international concern
Rapid Response
Capability of rapidly responding to and mitigating the spread of an epidemic
Health System
Sufficient and robust and health system to treat the sick and protect health workers
Compliance with Global Norms
Compliance with international norms by improving national capacity, financing plans to address gaps
Risk Environment
Risk environment and country vulnerability to biological threats
Note: The GHS Index is a project of the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security (JHU), and was developed with The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU).
Country Overall Rankings
Overall, the rankings uncover a distressing insight. Global preparedness for both epidemics and pandemics is weak, with the average score in the index sitting at 40.2 out of 100.
The countries with the highest scores have effective governance and politics systems in place, while those with the lowest scores fall down for their inadequate healthcare systems—even among high-income countries.
Here are the 10 highest-ranking countries in the index:
You can view the complete rankings of all 195 countries on the GHS Index website.
Interestingly, 81% of countries score in the bottom tier for indicators related to biosecurity—and worse, 85% of countries show no evidence of having completed a biological threat-focused simulation exercise in conjunction with the World Health Organization (WHO) in the past year.
Confirmed COVID-19 Cases vs. Global Health Security Score
Many healthcare systems have had their security tested with the outbreak of COVID-19.
Although it is still extremely early, there appears to be a relationship between a nation’s health security and its ability to cope with pandemics.
Takeaways: A World Unprepared
While there may be top performers relative to other countries, the overall picture paints a grim picture that foreshadowed the current crisis we are living through.
“It is likely that the world will continue to face outbreaks that most countries are ill positioned to combat. In addition to climate change and urbanization, international mass displacement and migration—now happening in nearly every corner of the world—create ideal conditions for the emergence and spread of pathogens.”
– The Global Health Security Index, 2019
The report outlined eight critical insights about global health security in 2019 that reveal some of the problems countries are now facing.
National health security is fundamentally weak globally. No country is fully prepared for epidemics or pandemics, and every country has important gaps to address.
Countries are not prepared for a globally catastrophic biological event.
There is little evidence that most countries have tested important health security capacities or shown that they would be functional in a crisis.
Most countries have not allocated funding from national budgets to fill identified preparedness gaps.
More than half of countries face major political and security risks that could undermine national capability to combat biological threats.
Most countries lack basic health systems capacities critical for epidemic and pandemic response.
Coordination and training are inadequate among veterinary, wildlife, and public health professionals and policymakers.
Improving country compliance with international health and security norms is essential.
A Stark Reality
The intention of the Global Health Security Index is to encourage improvements in the planning and response to one of the world’s most omnipresent risks–infectious disease outbreaks. When this report was released in 2019, it revealed that even the highest ranking nations still had gaps to fill in preparing for a pandemic.
Of course, hindsight is 20/20. The COVID-19 outbreak has served as a wake-up call to health organizations and governments around the world. Once all of the curves have been flattened, the next version of this report will undoubtedly be viewed with renewed interest.
