District of Columbia Mayor Muriel Bowser yesterday ordered a one-month extension of the state of emergency, as cases in the region grow at a rapid pace. Federal officials in the nation’s capital expect a New York-like epidemic in the District, Maryland and Virginia, one that could potentially cripple the government.
“No one wants to talk evacuation, especially when there’s nowhere to go,” says a senior military officer working on continuity of government planning; he requested anonymity because he is not authorized to speak on the record.
But a little-known military task force charged with evacuating Washington has already been activated, a task force charged with the most sensitive government mission of “securing” Washington in the face of attackers, foreign and domestic—and if necessary, moving White House and other key government offices to alternate locations.
Activated on March 16, Joint Task Force National Capital Region (JTF-NCR) is chartered to “defend” Washington on land, in the air, and even on its waterfronts. The special task force, the only one of its kind in the country, demonstrates how there are two sides of government preparedness. The public face, and even the day-to-day work of most men and women assigned to JTF-NCR, is the same as it is everywhere else in the country—medical support, delivering supplies, manning health-check stations.
But behind the scenes, JTF-NCR is responsible for what the military calls “homeland defense”: what to do in the face of an armed attack on the United States, everything from guarding Washington’s skies to preparing for the civil unrest that could occur if a nuclear weapon were detonated in the capital. But most immediate, JTF-NCR is charged with facilitating continuity of government, particularly moving civil and military leaders to secret locations were the order given to evacuate the city.
Ever since National Guards started to activate countrywide, Pentagon officials have insisted that men and women in uniform are not conducting secret missions and that they will not administer or enforce “stay at home” quarantines. The Pentagon has also rejected reports, including articles in Newsweek, about martial law or other extreme contingency plans, arguing that the Guard remains under strict control of state governors, while federal troops support civil agencies like FEMA.
And yet the activation of Joint Task Force National Capital Region, including almost 10,000 uniformed personnel to carry out its special orders, contradicts those assurances. JTF-NCR is not only real and operating, reporting directly to the Secretary of Defense for some of its mission, but some of its units are already on 24/7 alert, specially sequestered on military bases and kept out of coronavirus support duties to ensure their readiness.
A pretty good article by Judy Twigg appeared in recent days in the National Interest which details the time frame in which the likely peak for Covid-19 cases will occur. The article also delves into Russia’s geography, demographics and health care system and how these will likely factor in to the length and severity of the pandemic there. Here is an excerpt:
Over the past two weeks, Russia’s leadership has started to take the coronavirus pandemic seriously. As of April 9, 11,917 Russians were reported to be infected, based on over a million conducted tests, and the numbers are doubling every two to three days. Key national experts are predicting the timing of Russia’s peak for April 17–21, with infections not falling off significantly until early to mid-June. The government appears to be bracing for the worst. Currently, twenty thousand hospital beds, both public and private, are being prepared in Moscow alone.
So far, Russia’s epidemic is heavily Moscow-centric, but it’s shifting noticeably to hot spots in other parts of the country. The identified case load outside Moscow has climbed from 29 percent to 34 percent of all infections just over the last few days, and that’s with testing activity skewed heavily toward Moscow and a few of the natural resource-rich regions of Siberia and the Far East. The relatively low number of confirmed cases in St. Petersburg—408, as of April 10—may have something to do with only forty thousand tests having been performed there.
In terms of sheer numbers of reported tests performed and per-capita coverage of testing, Russia is one of the top countries. The quality and coverage of that testing, however, is unclear. Tests are being processed at 190 public laboratories around the country as well as a handful of private labs and clinics. New Russian-produced tests are said to be under development to deliver results more rapidly and precisely. There are numerous anecdotal reports, however, of people hospitalized with pneumonia without being tested for coronavirus, even though their conditions clearly indicate they might be infected. A Higher School of Economics survey conducted on April 4–5 found that half of Russians think the authorities are understating the actual number of infected people, while only 12 percent find the official statistics reliable.
It’s not that the Kremlin is systematically and maliciously manipulating the books, taking in one set of numbers and then reporting out something different. The reality is surely more nuanced, having to do with factors like the criteria established for testing, and with the incentive structure at the lower levels of the system to report bad news.
In light of the worldwide economic slowdown caused by the pandemic and the resulting slump in oil demand, OPEC+ – which includes OPEC, Mexico and Russia – agreed to cut oil production by about 10%. The agreement reportedly happened after intervention by the United States in the negotiations. According to AP:
American officials have gotten involved with OPEC in the past, making phone calls or attempting to sway a deal during international crises and unusual circumstances. The intervention has typically been in response to high prices; instead, in the current situation, oil prices dropped more than 60% since the start of the year…
…Mexico stalled the negotiations by refusing to cut more than 100,000 barrels a day of production, when OPEC was asking for double or triple that amount. Trump said the U.S. would help by shouldering the cuts that Mexico was unwilling to make….
“They had to agree to give something like a cover story, a diplomatic cover, so that the other parties in OPEC, who whether they liked it or not were going to have to accept these terms, would be able to do so without a loss of prestige,” said Kevin Book, managing director at Clearview Energy Partners.
Trump’s statements also signaled that the U.S. views Mexico as an important partner in the integrated North American energy market, said Amy Myers Jaffe, senior fellow at the Council for Foreign Relations, who also saw it as an important policy move. “I think it will serve the president well on every count,” including border issues, she said.
The economic slump and steep reduction in oil prices is expected to reduce Russia’s GDP by .5 to 1% this year when it was expected previously to enjoy a modest rise. But due to the conservative macroeconomic policies the Russian government oversaw over the past several years due to western sanctions, the country is in a reasonable position to weather the storm. Chris Weafer, an economic analyst who has lived and worked in Russia for years explained the possible future scenarios:
.Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government has spent the last three years meticulously, i.e. at a painfully slow pace, preparing a fiscal and industrial strategy that the president hopes will lead to sustained economic recovery. More than that, his ambition is to also use these programs to improve social conditions. This means he would have greater public support for whatever succession strategy he chooses in 2024, as opinion polls show that support for the president has become closely linked with economic wellbeing…
…The big policy and spending decisions will likely be made after the summer when, presumably, there is a better sense of the damage caused, both domestically and globally, by the pandemic. By then the oil price trend should also be clearer. If both look favorable, then expect few major changes to the current recovery strategy. But, if the oil price remains well below the breakeven and is in danger of staying there into 2021, then we can expect big changes to spending plans and to economic, social and political expectations. Putin would not approve a budget deficit for two years in a row because of the risk of financial erosion and leaving the country vulnerable to future sanctions risk.
Existing sanctions, while acting as a positive catalyst initially, are proving a big drag on inward investment. Investors are reluctant to engage more with Russia because of perceived reputational and business risk. That is certainly slowing the pace of recovery and increasing the financial burden on the federal budget. Hence, it is the size of oil tax receipts that matters more over the medium term than additional sanctions.
Longer term, investment flow is critical for the development of any economy. Russia can make progress during the remainder of Putin’s current term, and come very close to the ambitious economic and social targets he has set, if the oil price recovers and COVID-19 is dealt with in 2020.
The Covid-19 pandemic is hitting Moscow the hardest by far, with the capital accounting for over half of the national total of 12,000 by this past Friday. Reports indicate that Moscow hospitals are now at maximum capacity. AFPreports:
Moscow’s hospitals and ambulance service are working at peak capacity after a sharp rise in those hospitalized with serious coronavirus complications, a senior city official said Friday.
The densely populated capital with more than 12 million residents has the largest outbreak in Russia, with 7,822 confirmed coronavirus cases out of a national total of almost 12,000.
The number in Moscow’s hospitals has doubled since last week and more than 85% of these patients have pneumonia, deputy mayor Anastasia Rakova was quoted as saying on the city virus task force’s Telegram account.
Moscow is not sending people with mild symptoms to hospitals. Those who test positive are monitored through online video consultations.
The city has been on lockdown since the end of March and the mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, is predicting that they have not approached the peak yet.
A new hospital to specifically treat Covid-19 patients, with 500-bed capacity, has been under rush construction and is scheduled to open later this month.
Last week Putin announced that health care workers would receive a pay raise for the duration of the pandemic in recognition of their hard work and sacrifice. More on this and the status of the Covid-19 response in the country can be found in the video below:
China, meanwhile, sent a team of medical experts to Russia on April 11th to assist with the pandemic, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry announced. According to a TASS news agency report, the Chinese ambassador to Russia, Zhang Hanhui made the following public remarks:
“We won’t forget our friends who helped us. We are ready to do everything possible to help them overcome this crisis. We will express our full gratitude for helping us during a difficult time,” he said.
The ambassador reminded that at the start of the epidemic, Russian President Vladimir Putin sent a telegram to Chinese leader Xi Jinping with words of support, after which Russia sent a military plane with 23 tonnes of medical goods to China. “Now that our friends in the north are facing an epidemiological crisis, we must do our duty,” he said, noting that on April 2, China sent 26 tonnes of humanitarian aid to Russia.
It started well before the Covid-19 pandemic, but it is sure being ramped up in the wake of the virus. The demonization of China has been seen for years now in the corporate media, particularly among conservatives. It was part of the inspiration for the rise in right-wing populism that led to Trump’s victory in 2016.
Many working-class Americans had carried a smoldering anger for years about the corporate trade deals that saw millions of manufacturing jobs – for decades the backbone of an economy that was based on production of real goods – taken overseas. Permanent normal trade relations with China translated into over 2 million manufacturing jobs going to China which helped to underpin that country’s lifting of millions of its citizens out of poverty. This was perceived to be at the expense of the American worker. This is not an unjustified view.
However, the hard truth is that the Chinese government did not hold a gun to the economic elites’ heads in the United States, forcing them to relinquish millions of living wage jobs for Americans. The economic elites in the United States willingly did so due to greed and no sense of loyalty to their fellow Americans. Patriotism is for the rubes according to the elites who do not see themselves bound by such quaint notions.
It is much easier for FOX news personalities, Rising co-host Sagaar Enjeti and others, to portray China as some uniquely evil country than to hold American elites to account for their betrayal, along with the corporate media’s role from the 1990’s on in legitimizing corporate free trade as a law of nature not to be questioned.
As for China itself, it is definitely an authoritarian country. However, it is governed in a more complicated manner than the overly simplistic characterization provided by US corporate media outlets and politicians. China’s leadership does have a certain degree of accountability to its people, but it’s not via elections, which westerners see as the only viable means of political accountability. In the TED Talk below, Eric X. Li explains how China is actually governed, why the country has been able to achieve so much in a relatively short period of time, and what forms of accountability the Chinese leadership is held to in the absence of formal elections. Li points out that western analysts don’t have a familiar box in which to place China:
Another criticism we often hear about China’s authoritarianism is its alleged treatment of millions of Muslim Uyghurs in its Xinjiang province. But where are these stories of Chinese Uyghur repression coming from and how credible are they? In a recent in-depth report published at The Grayzone, investigative journalists Max Blumenthal and Ajit Singh detail how these allegations have been amplified based on threadbare evidence:
The claim that China has detained millions of ethnic Uyghurs in its Xinjiang region is repeated with increasing frequency, but little scrutiny is ever applied. Yet a closer look at the figure and how it was obtained reveals a serious deficiency in data.
The second study relied on flimsy media reports and speculation. It was authored by Adrian Zenz, a far-right fundamentalist Christian who opposes homosexuality and gender equality, supports “scriptural spanking” of children, and believes he is “led by God” on a “mission” against China.
As Washington ratchets up pressure on China, Zenz has been lifted out of obscurity and transformed almost overnight into a go-to pundit on Xinjiang. He has testified before Congress, providing commentary in outlets from the Wall Street Journal to Democracy Now!, and delivering expert quotes in the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ recent “China Cables” report. His Twitter bio notes that he is “moving across the Atlantic” from his native Germany.
Blumenthal and Singh go on to explain how the credibility of these claims suffer as the sources for them are exposed to scrutiny.
The “millions detained” figure was first popularized by a Washington, DC-based NGO that is backed by the US government, the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD).
In a 2018 report submitted to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination – often misrepresented in Western media as a UN-authored report – CHRD “estimate[d] that roughly one million members of ethnic Uyghurs have been sent to ‘re-education’ detention camps and roughly two million have been forced to attend ‘re-education’ programs in Xinjiang.” According to CHRD, this figure was “[b]ased on interviews and limited data.”
While CHRD states that it interviewed dozens of ethnic Uyghurs in the course of its study, their enormous estimate was ultimately based on interviews with exactly eight Uyghur individuals…
….Thanks to questionable sources like the CHRD, the United States government has accused China of “arbitrarily detain[ing] 800,000 to possibly more than two million Uighurs, ethnic Kazakhs, and other Muslims in internment camps designed to erase religious and ethnic identities.”
I have written in my first book and on this blog about the National Endowment for Democracy and its genesis as the government agency created by congress in the wake of the Church Committee hearings which exposed the deadly operations of the CIA that outraged the American public: “In 1983, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was born and Allen Weinstein, who helped write the legislation that brought it into existence, admitted in 1991, ‘A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.’”
Blumenthal and Singh discuss the second major source for the Uyghurs in concentration camps claims against China:
The second key source for claims that China has detained millions of Uyghur Muslims is Adrian Zenz. He is a senior fellow in China studies at the far-right Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which was established by the US government in 1983.
The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation is an outgrowth of the National Captive Nations Committee, a group founded by Ukrainian nationalist Lev Dobriansky to lobby against any effort for detente with the Soviet Union. Its co-chairman, Yaroslav Stetsko, was a top leader of the fascist OUN-B militia that fought alongside Nazi Germany during its occupation of Ukraine in World War Two. Together, the two helped found the World Anti-Communist League that was described by journalist Joe Conason as “the organizational haven for neo-Nazis, fascists, and anti-Semitic extremists from two dozen countries.”
Today, Dobriansky’s daughter, Paula, sits on the board of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. A former Reagan and George HW Bush official and signatory of the original Project for a New American Century document, Paula Dobriansky has become a fixture in neoconservative circles on Capitol Hill.
Like Russia, China is a country on the other side of the world with a different history, culture and geography. It doesn’t have the same interests as the United States. It’s also a major economic power. It is therefore a competitor to the United States. But a competitor doesn’t necessarily have to be an enemy to be vilified. I don’t see the genuine problems between the United States and China as being insurmountable, but instead they could be managed with courage and skillful diplomacy. But as I’ve explained in regard to managing relations with Russia, diplomacy requires an understanding of the other nation’s perceived interests and what shapes them. For some insight into how the U.S. military posture in Asia – which the Pentagon is now quietly requesting $20 billion more for – may look from China’s perspective, check out award-winning journalist John Pilger’s documentary “The Coming War on China”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDl9ecICIYg
Unfortunately, for a significant segment of our political class, the world is a Manichean place in which any other country who has the capability of pursuing national interests that are separate from the United States, must be met with a mobilization for war and the propaganda framing to support it, which the defense industry and the corporate media profit from. This represents an immature, arrogant and entitled mindset that is a holdover from our 3-decades long stint of being able to dominate much of the globe with our economic power, petrodollar and 700+ military bases. That domination is not sustainable and is in the process of collapsing. It is time for our political class to accept it and adopt a more mature outlook in which we manage our problems with competitor nations with sophisticated diplomacy and a dose of humility.
