Despite campaigning in opposition to Trump’s handling of the pandemic, Biden has adopted Trump’s signature policy demands: “open the schools” and “open the businesses.”...AND WIDER OPEN BORDERS FOR MORE 'CHEAP' LABOR!
One year into the pandemic, 65,000 deaths in the US in one month
11 hours ago
One year after the first cases of COVID-19 were identified in China, December was the deadliest month of the pandemic both in the United States and throughout the world.
More than 65,000 Americans lost their lives to the virus over the past 28 days. At the present rate, deaths in December will be double what they were in November, when nearly 37,000 people died. The United States accounts for about a third of the global death toll of 175,000 over the past month.
By the end of this week, total deaths in the US will surpass 350,000, and the number of people who have tested positive for COVID-19 will reach 20 million. Another 193,000 people could die in this country over the next two months, according to predictions from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.
Experts have warned that even this scenario may be optimistic. “We very well might see a post-seasonal—in the sense of Christmas, New Year’s—surge,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, on Sunday. “The projections are just nightmarish,” Peter Hotez, an infectious disease specialist at the Baylor College of Medicine, told CNN.
In a warning to the rest of the world, the number of daily new cases hit an all-time record of 42,000 in the UK yesterday, driven by the emergence of a new strain of the disease that medical experts estimate is 56 percent more transmissible than the original.
US Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary Brett Giroir said Monday that the new and more dangerous strain of the virus is “likely” already present in the United States. He was left to speculate because, unlike the UK, the US does not have a genetic surveillance system in place to ascertain the presence of different strains of the disease.
Meanwhile, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to surge throughout the country. “California is now the only place (state or country) in the world” with more than 1,000 new COVID-19 cases per million people, noted physician Eric Topol.
Southern California, the state’s most populous region, as well as San Joaquin Valley, in the state’s center, have zero percent ICU bed capacity. On Sunday, Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center Chief Medical Officer Dr. Brad Spellberg said that the hospital faced a “massive crisis.” Another hospital in the region has begun issuing guidelines for patients and families as to how the hospital will make decisions on who will live and who will die if care has to be rationed.
In the midst of this disaster, no section of the US political establishment is calling for emergency measures to contain the pandemic. Last week, President-elect Joe Biden warned that the “darkest days are ahead of us, not behind us.” And yet he has rejected the demand by Dr. Michael Osterholm and other scientists for an emergency shutdown of nonessential production, declaring, “I am not going to shut down the economy, period.”
Despite campaigning in opposition to Trump’s handling of the pandemic, Biden has adopted Trump’s signature policy demands: “open the schools” and “open the businesses.”
This is despite the influx of scientific data proving the importance of closing schools and businesses in containing COVID-19. A study published this month in Science found that closing schools and universities reduces the spread of COVID-19 by 38 percent, and closing nonessential face-to-face businesses reduced transmission by 18 percent.
In the media, the scale of the catastrophe unfolding in the United States is less and less reported. A deliberate decision has been made to focus attention not on mass death and the overwhelming of the US health care system, but on the initial production and distribution of vaccines.
But as the federal government begins distributing vaccine doses to states, the US has inoculated just one-tenth of the number of people it had planned—just 2 million of the 20 million people health authorities said would be vaccinated by the end of the year. Images emerged yesterday of hundreds of elderly patients lining up for limited doses.
A report in Kaiser Health News called the US vaccine rollout a “mess,” noting that many states have not received close to the number they were promised. The publication wrote: “Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the US health-care system has shown that it is not built for a coordinated pandemic response (among many other things)… Why should vaccine distribution be any different?”
Even in the best of circumstances, the vaccine will not be broadly available until sometime in the spring or summer of next year. Moreover, scientists have warned that the emergence of the new, more infectious strain of the virus means that a higher percentage of the population will have to be vaccinated to stop community spread of the coronavirus.
The refusal of the entire political establishment to take the necessary measures to save lives is a continuation of its policy throughout the pandemic. No measures will be taken that contravene the interests of the financial oligarchy. To this end, governments around the world embraced the doctrine of “herd immunity”—calling for the mass infection of the population, with one White House official declaring, “We want them infected.”
This has led to the uncontrolled spread of the pandemic, with hundreds of thousands of fatalities, together with the greatest surge of hunger and unemployment since the Great Depression. On the other hand, this same policy has produced the massive enrichment of the financial oligarchy, whose wealth has soared as the US central bank pumped trillions of dollars into the financial markets.
And the markets continue their relentless rise. The Dow Jones Industrial Average increased 200 points to a new record yesterday, leading to a further rise in the wealth of US billionaires. Over the past year, Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, has seen his fortune grow by $77 billion, hitting $192 billion on Monday. The wealth of Elon Musk, now the second richest man in the world, has surged from $28.5 billion to $160 billion.
Urgent measures must be taken to prevent mass death! But this requires that the working class intervene independently, in opposition to the pandemic profiteers and their political representatives.
The pandemic is demonstrating the basic reality that capitalism is at war with society. The working class must mobilize in a united struggle against this bankrupt and homicidal system.
Biden to Illegals: Never Mind!
Surprise!:
Top advisers to president-elect Joe Biden said Monday they will not immediately roll back asylum restrictions at the Mexico border and other restrictive Trump administration policies, walking back some of Biden’s campaign promises for “Day One” changes.
As I noted on the National Review home page last week, this was inevitable.
. . .
Ironically, by delaying the full effect of his immigration promises, Biden sets up a situation where news of the renewed border crisis caused by his rollback of Trump’s policies may only break through the inevitable media blackout just when the midterm-election campaign is underway. Republican candidates would do well to start preparing now.
Read the full article at National Review.
Wave of 'Extra-Continental' Migrants Predicted in Biden's First Year
Migrants from terror-plagued countries and around the world are bottled up in Latin America, waiting for the green light
Extra-continental migrants from Sri Lanka, India, and Pakistan moving through Costa Rica, December 2018. Photo by Todd Bensman.
It bears remembering that next year's now-broadly predicted surge of illegal immigration to the U.S. Southwest Border — largely the result of the Biden campaign's months of messaging that the incoming president will clear all obstacles and penalties for it — will include not only Spanish-speakers.
Aspiring migrants who in past years have shown up from more than 150 countries also have heard the Biden-Harris clarion calls of welcome. They are building up behind a dam of Latin America coronavirus border closures and of President Trump's deterrence policies, waiting for the moment when they are all removed sometime during 2021.
As the Center for Immigration Studies has frequently reported, migrants from very distant countries are known in aptly descriptive government parlance as "extra-continentals" or, if they are from countries where violent jihadist ideology is ubiquitous, "special interest aliens". (See this January 2020 CIS video report about extra-continental and special interest alien migration.)
Besides often evidence-free tales of persecution, war, and economic woe, these uninvited strangers also will arrive as higher national security risks that will need careful scrutiny considering the ills that beset their home countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. They will show up, often without even identification, never vetted for involvements in Islamic terrorism, espionage, war crimes, or other criminality they may have committed in home countries with failed governments unable to keep intelligence databases or criminal files that American authorities can check.
Even with the pandemic border closures in Central America and the Trump deterrence policies, a tractor beam has reached out and grabbed extra-continentals in increasing numbers. Even despite obstacles, apprehensions at the American southern border — of those from neither Mexico nor the Northern Triangle countries of Central America — more than doubled since July, from 2,526 to 5,752 through the end of November, CBP statistics show.
It seems the numbers can go nowhere but skyward once the path is cleared, since a great many more have been bottling up for months in countries like Panama, waiting for the right conditions — the seating of a President Joe Biden with his plan to undo Trump policies and the lifting of pandemic-related border closures as the virus wanes — which are both on the immediate or intermediate horizon.
The Panama Dam
A group of four Iranian migrants moving through Costa Rica, December 2018. Photo by Todd Bensman.
Thousands of extra-continentals are backed up in heavily transited Panama, which as CIS reported from the country in late 2018, has long served as an almost unavoidable through-way for U.S.-bound migrants who initially landed in South America. At least 22,000 migrants entered Panama from Colombia during 2019.
A recent United Nations report said a Panamanian coronavirus quarantine in effect since March has trapped or significantly slowed migrants from Haiti, Congo, Bangladesh, and Yemen in increasingly overcrowded government camps. It's unclear how many are stuck in Panama at any given moment, but the situation is so dire that a range of UN agencies have flocked to the isthmus nation to provide basic needs while migrants wait for the quarantine to lift or find other ways to keep going.
Before the region's quarantine, Panama and Costa Rica had an agreement known as "controlled flow" that provided government food, temporary shelter, medical care, and buses that would move the migrants from one country to the next; Nicaragua did not participate, so human smugglers took over from there. But now Costa Rica has closed its borders for the pandemic, as have Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico. All forward movement is now back in the hands of human smugglers for those who can muster the money to pay.
Costa Rica media reported that thousands of Cubans, Haitians, Nepalese, Congolese, Cameroonians, and Indians are now stuck in Panamanian camps, unable to proceed to the Costa Rica border. Frustration has led to unrest in the government camp for 200 people in the small Panamanian village of La Penita, where up to 2,000 migrants stuck there have set fire to facilities and damaged vehicles in their demands to be set free.
The mayor told media that the town's residents "have for months been worried and scared" and had taken to threatening vigilante action.
Another migrant population has built up in the Lajas Blancas migration station in the same Darien Province bordering Colombia while Panama builds a new camp.
"This is like a pressure cooker," Walter Cotte, regional director of the Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent for the Americas and Caribbean told French media in August.
The Mexico Dam
Cameroonian migrant who transited Mexico in Acunia camp, 2019. Photo by Todd Bensman.
While the governments of Honduras and Guatemala have broken up several U.S.-bound migrant caravans to enforce their own coronavirus border closures, extra-continental migrants obviously still get through to Mexico with the aid of smugglers, individually and in small groups.
In October, Brazilian and American federal agents broke up a human smuggling network that kept very busy transporting Yemeni migrants. That bust came on the heels of one in September, also in Brazil, that moved Iranians to the American border, which followed the breakup of a smuggling network in August that moved hundreds of Sri Lankans.
But they kept coming despite these setbacks.
According to a just-released Mexican government report on migration, 8,992 Africans reached Mexico between January and October 2020. The Mexican report is opaque on details for migration from other countries outside of the Americas, all of which are accounted for.
One category described as "unspecified" has 17,043 migrants arriving on Mexican territory — again, not from the Americas. Another 21,280 hailed from the island archipelago known as "Oceania" between Asia and the Americas extending from Mexico's Pacific side, according to the new report. All of those numbers were up compared to the last couple of years.
A Pakistani migrant in Tapachula, Mexico, January 2020. Photo by Todd Bensman.
Mexico's national guard has been blocking extra-continental migrants who arrive in its southern states from proceeding north since June 2019, but as CIS reported earlier this year, smugglers known as polleros are still able to get many around the guard's network of 50 roadblocks. That's partly why Middle Easterners, Haitians, Cubans, and Africans are still able to reach the U.S. border these days.
It's not just CIS that has been warning of this peculiar kind of migration crisis in 2021, either. The Department of Homeland Security has explicitly warned about the dangers of an extra-continental migrant surge, too, especially as it relates to terrorist infiltration.
DHS: "Vulnerabilities may create an environment that foreign terrorist organizations could exploit."
If the incoming Biden administration chooses to not hear or see analysis coming from CIS or security hawks, it should take at least some cues from the professional career intelligence community analysts who wrote the Department of Homeland Security's recently released first national threat assessment.
When it was released in October, the assessment gained widespread media attention and drew no serious credibility challenge for its conclusion that white supremacist violence posed a top domestic national security threat in 2021.
But the DHS assessment also predicted a significant surge of migration from outside the western hemisphere to the southern border, among them a kind of migrant the authors somewhat ambiguously referred to as "threat actors".
The assessment said this about a surge of migrants it predicted as coming to the southern border from around the world:
"Although the majority of migrants do not pose a national security or public safety threat, pathways used by migrants to travel to the United States have been exploited by threat actors," the report states. "As a result, surges of migrants could undermine our ability to effectively secure the border."
The assessment goes on to make reference to foreign terrorist organization interest in probing for "vulnerabilities in US immigration and border security programs". It said that, "Collectively, vulnerabilities may create an illegal migration environment that FTO's [foreign terrorist organizations] could exploit to facilitate the movement of affiliated persons toward the United States."
Let the DHS assessment stand as an early warning that the Biden administration should prepare for extra-continentals in a way that must be different from anything it has in mind for Spanish-speaking migrants, who also are expected to rush the southern border sometime in 2021.
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