- (october 2020)
The USA is playing with fire: The Rise of US Fascism.
For mysterious reasons the mainstream media keep avoiding the word "fascism"
when discussing Trump, Fox News and their fanatics.
Fox News is a fascist channel, advocating a takeover of democracy
by undemocratic means.
Trump's strategy is more fascist than ever.
First of all, create two enemies, one at home and one abroad.
For Hitler the enemies at home were the Jews, and the enemies abroad were the
democrastic countries.
For Trump the enemies at home are the "socialists", and the enemy abroad is China or Iran (not Russia, of course).
Like Hitler and Mussolini (and more recently Putin), Trump is fundamentally a thug who presides over an organization of thugs, and he is the one who creates the chaos and then preaches that he is the only one who can restore order.
Like Hitler and Mussolini (and Putin), he is the the most lawless person in politics, but he runs to restore "law and order".
(See The Trump Scandals).
Continues in The Fascist Coup in the USA...
TM, ®, Copyright © 2020 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (october 2020)
Change the US constitution.
This article moved
- (october 2020)
The Damage Caused by Trump's Immigration Policies.
In September 2020 Trump announced significant changes to the H-1B visa program for high-skilled workers that over the years has attracted thousands of foreign engineers and scientists to the USA.
Having dumber but US-born engineers and scientists will not help US companies and laboratories remain competitive against foreign companies and an increasingly competitive China and will curtail innovation in Silicon Valley where the majority of startups are founded by foreign-born immigrants.
This is a gift to foreign firms and to China in particular: Chinese engineers and scientists will now finding much more difficult to emigrate to the USA.
Trump is a traitor of the USA in many ways, from his Russia collusion to his tax evasions, and his immigration policies are de facto a terrorist attack against the USA whose long-term consequences will be more painful than anything Al Qaeda ever dreamed of.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2020 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (october 2020)
Top issues of the USA
Sorry if it's politically incorrect in the middle of the George Floyd protests, but IMHO racism doesn't even make the top-5 most pressing problems for the USA.
First there are the existential issues: Covid-19 (that may well kill one million citizens if no vaccine arrives in 2021) and North Korea (which keeps improving its nuclear missiles and next year may be able to strike the USA).
I also think that the USA urgently needs to amend the constitution, which is causing most of its problems (See Change the US constitution).
And whatever happened to climate change? Were all those marches just picnics? Then there are geopolitical issues like the relationship with China (probably the single most important issue that will shape the world in this century) and Russia (the first country ever to install its own puppet president in the USA), and the relationships with the US allies (Europe, east Asia). And we forgot the Middle East, where the USA caused the death of millions of people and then decided to simply say "oops" but still arms Saudi Arabia and Israel. Domestically, the #1 existential issue is: guns. The NRA is still the most powerful terrorist organization in the world, and it's based in the USA. Guns kill way more young people than all viruses combined. Remove guns and all this debate about police brutality will go away because cops won't be afraid to confront suspects the way they are now.
Then universal health care. Then education (which really shapes the future of a country, and takes care of all the other problems - it is appalling how many US citizens believe all sorts of unscientific unfounded stories).
Then income inequality. Then immigration laws. Then infrastructure (like highspeed trains).
Therefore, and again sorry if it's politically incorrect in the middle of the George Floyd protests, i don't consider racism as an important topic in this list.
We seem to have forgotten that a black man was elected US president, not once but twice, and in pretty much landslide victories, against two white men. I wish that Europeans or Russians or Chinese or Brazilians could say the same about their minorities.
I fail to see the endemic racism as a major problem of the USA (and i am not denying that there exists discrimination against blacks in many places, just like i don't deny that there is discrimination against Hispanics, Asians and Indians in other places).
What is certainly endemic is discrimination against women: not a single female president in more than 200 years. The USA has had a black president but never a woman president, despite the fact that women are 50% of the population. And, by the way, the USA never had a president with a Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Slavic, Scandinavian, etc last name despite the fact that these minorities together represent about one third of the US population and have been around for two centuries. And of course no Native-American has ever become president or close to becoming president.
There is also discrimination against young people. When the choice is between two men in their 70s, one has to wonder: is it possible that the USA doesn't have anybody under 40 who is smarter and more competent than these two?
What is wrong with Austria's Sebastian Kurz, Finland's Sanna Marin, or New Zealand's Jacina Ardern?
They all have done a much better job than the septuagenarian Donald Trump.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2020 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (october 2020)
For an Anthropological Study of Trump and FoxNews
This article moved here
- (september 2020)
Who will win the elections?
The first presidential debate of 2020 took place on September 29. This was 18 years after the terrorist attacks of September 11. Islamic terrorists hoped to inflict a deadly blow to the USA. No Islamic terrorist dreamed that the USA would inflict much bigger damage to itself by itself.
It was sad to watch the first presidential of 2020: two elderly white men (note the "white" and the "men"), one rambling incoherently about all sorts of silly conspiracy theories and about his greatness like a patient in a mental asylum, the other one challenged to show that he can articulate a few simple sentences.
Most of the world was terrified by what it saw, China and Russia laughed, North Korea and Iran were reassured.
First of all: Trump is the first US president who will go to jail if he loses the election. His tax returns would go public, witnesses of his criminal activities would come forward, all the investigations will proceed faster without his consigliere William Barr stopping them. There wouldn't be a stone where he could hide.
He also owes $400 million to a variety of creditors. Besides being a crook, he is also broke.
Keep that in mind when you read polls and predictions: he cannot lose the
election or he goes to jail, possibly for the rest of his life.
He will do anything to remain in power: he may ask Russia to hack the vote count,
he may find ways to manipulate the ballots, he may rally his supporters to stage a coup, he may start a war with China one day before voting day... anything you can think of is on the table.
The last thing he cares for is the interest or the future of the country.
He cannot lose this election.
His propaganda machine will unleash a torrent of conspiracy theories against his rival, just like they did in 2016.
Trump found a messianic ally and servant in William Barr, a man who cares zero about the law and the constitution. Barr will invent any "investigation" in Biden's private or public life just days before election day. If Trump loses, Barr could invent a legal opinion stating that Trump remains president.
Trump keeps talking about the "China virus" and attacking China on every front.
Beware of a potential last-minute scandal invented by Barr that would involve Biden to make it look like he is an agent of the Chinese Communist Party.
It is almost grotesque that, after the endless scandals of corruption in the Trump administration
(see The Trump Scandals), the pro-Trump neofascist media focus on Biden's son, but don't be surprised if two days before election day Barr makes an announcement implying that Biden's son is officially indicted of something (something that will go away after the election just like Hillary Clinton's famous email server).
These are Putin's tactics to discredit the pro-democracy dissidents in Russia,
despite the fact that Putin is 100 times more corrupt than them.
Trump is simply learning from his master.
And do not for a second think that this is not only about the 2020 presidential race: it is also about 2024, 2028 and so on until the day Trump dies. He cannot afford to lose an election. He has hinted repeatedly that he would like to be reelected a third term, and at a rally when the crowd was chanting "four more years" he responded "twelve more years".
Second: Trump did not win the 2016 election. Hillary Clinton won by three million votes. Without the FBI investigation in Clinton's email server and Russia's interference, Clinton would have won by an even bigger margin. The vast majority of US voters voted against Trump. Given that Trump's approval rating has never matched the percentage of people who voted for him (i.e. he is even less popular in 2020 than he was in 2016),
we already know that Biden will win the popular vote, and probably by an even bigger margin than Hillary Clinton did.
Trump knows it too, and knows that the chances of winning the electoral college are slim. Hence he already promised to contest the results of the elections.
Hence, the problem for Biden is not only to win the electoral college but winning it by a margin so big that Trump cannot claim that the elections were rigged.
Biden is the first candidate in history who must not only win but win overwhelmingly. Winning will not be enough to make him the president.
Third: If Hillary Clinton had been president there is little doubt that she would have antagonized Russia from Syria to Venezuela, she would not have been humiliated by tiny North Korea, she would not have been expelled from Iraq by Iran, she would not have betrayed the Kurdish allies in Syria, she would have strengthened (not weakened) the alliances of the USA in Asia and Europe, and, last but not least, would have managed the covid pandemic a lot better. The silly way that votes are counted (or, better, not counted) in the USA had a dramatic effect on the whole planet. She won the election but, thanks to a technicality in the US constitution, for four years the foreign policy of the USA was decided by her opponent, the loser of the election (an incompetent, senile, low-IQ, madman). The electoral college is a threat not only to US democracy but to the whole world.
Until the electoral college is eliminated, US elections will remain a horror movie, where the loser can become the legitimate president even if the majority of voters voted against him. Call it the way you like, but the only other countries where this happens are called "dictatorships".
And note that the aberration of the electoral college is endless: each "elector" of the electoral college, appointed by her/his state, can even betray her/his mandate and vote in a different way than her/his state voted. In 2016 seven such "electors" did NOT vote as their state mandated. The herculean task of collecting and counting all the votes nationwide is then ridiculed by this feudal spectacle of a bunch of state-appointed "electors" who are in charge of delivering the state's result to Washington.
Therefore the answer to the question "Who will win the elections?" is both
simple and complicated. Biden will win the election, but that doesn't mean
that he will become president. No matter how many people vote against Trump,
it is entirely possible that Trump will remain the most powerful man in the
world for four more years (or eight or twelve), with devastating consequences
for the whole of humankind.
Fourth: Most people stopped reading the news a long time ago. They have formed
their opinion on Trump, and they only read those articles that confirm that
opinion. The proof is simple.
In March the average of all polls put Biden with a 7.5% advantage over Trump.
In September the average of all polls put Biden with a 7.5% advantage over Trump.
Everything that happened in between didn't make any difference.
Covid deaths have skyrocketed from 1 to more than 200,000
(more the entire Europe combined).
The USA has been humiliated in North Korea, in Venezuela,
in Syria and in Ukraine. In 2020 the USA has fallen
militarily below Russia and economically below China.
The public has been flooded by an avalanche of revelations from people who
know Trump first-hand:
James Comey, former FBI director; John Bolton, former national security adviser;
Anthony Scaramucci, who served as Trump's director of communications; Cliff Sims, another former White House communications aide; Omarosa Manigault Newman, former assistant to the president; Andrew Weissmann, the lead prosecutor in Robert Mueller's office; Peter Strzok, a former FBI counterintelligence agent; Michael Cohen, Trump's personal lawyer; and even Trump's niece Mary.
Books such as John Bolton's "The Room where it Happened",
Bob Woodward's "Rage",
Michael Schmidt's "Donald Trump v. The United States",
Michael Cohen's "Disloyal",
Andrew Weissmann's "Where the Law Ends",
Peter Strzok's "Compromised" and
Mary Trump's "Too Much and Never Enough",
not to mention the ones published in previous years
(James Comey's "A Higher Loyalty,"
Omarosa Manigault Newman's "Unhinged",
Cliff Sims' "Team of Vipers" and so on)
describe Trump in the worst possible terms, and certainly unfit to rule.
In favor of Trump there have only been the racial riots linked to the "Black Lives Matter" movement (a major last-minute gift to the Trump campaign).
But nothing changed in the polls: Biden's advantage is still 7.5% just like
in March.
Most people read the first 140 characters, and nothing else. Anything beyond the 140th character is only for a small elite of intellectuals. Ditto for any documentary or interview longer than one minute.
Most people watch TikTok videos, not documentaries, not lengthy interviews.
If you are an intellectual, you watch lengthy discussions on YouTube by accredited scholars, but those get only a few thousand views. You are probably unaware that short videos of all kinds get millions of views: those are the videos that shape public opinion.
Most people live in echo chambers. If you are a Trump hater, you don't know
any of these books,
which most of us consider garbage propaganda of the worst communist kind,
but that are very easy to read (not much more difficult than a tweet)
and sold and still sell millions of copies:
Vic Hanson's "The Case for Trump",
Edward Klein's "All Out War: The Plot to Destroy Trump";
Lee Smith's "The Permanent Coup";
Gregg Jarrett's "The Russia Hoax: The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump";
David Horowitz's "BLITZ: Trump Will Smash the Left and Win."
A Fox News propagandist, Lou Dobbs, has announced a book comically titled "The Trump Century: How Our President Changed the Course of History Forever" (the title is eerily reminiscent of books published in Germany in the 1930s about Hitler).
That's the biggest difference between Trump and the other major scoundrel of recent US presidential history, Richard Nixon:
back then everybody (right and left) was horrified by the facts.
Now there is an entire media and publishing industry (mainly assembled around Fox News) that is working relentlessly to discredit the facts.
Besides, there are countless conspiracy theories that benefit Trump. That's a reversal from the old days, when conspiracy theories were mainly conceived by the communists to discredit the USA. Now they are mostly conceived by right-wing extremists and fanatical Christian fundamentalists.
Facebook hosts thousands of QAnon groups and pages, followed by millions of people. If you have a college degree, you're unlikely to know any of this, but those people believe in all sorts of unproven, unscientific theories and unfounded "facts" (no matter how many times you try to debunk them).
The combined effect of the neofascist propaganda, of the conspiracy theories and of the echo chambers is that even the most ridiculous statements by Trump become religious dogmas. Trump (whether he is senile or ignorant or both) frequently makes assertions that should make everybody laugh. Then, instead of apologizing and admitting the mistake, he doubles down accusing the left and the media and China and the United Nations and so on of conspiring against him. That works in the age of echo chambers: he can say any incredibly stupid thing and, as long as he doesn't back down, the echo chambers will never realize how stupid it was. Therefore he can talk of airplanes in the war of independence or ask you to bleach youself.
For what is worth, Biden will win by a landslide, and i suspect that this time the results will be analyzed mainly in terms of age group.
The previous election has been widely viewed as "uneducated white men vs the rest".
College graduates voted for Hillary Clinton by a 9-point margin (52%-43%), while those without a college degree voted for Trump by an 8-point margin (52%-44%). If we only look at white voters, Trump's margin was stratospheric: 67% of non-college whites voted for Trump, compared with just 28% who voted for Clinton. Many college graduates had a simple explanation: noncollege people are easier to be duped by a conman like Trump and to fall for Fox News' fake news.
Noncollege people had a different explanation: they felt hurt by globalization and immigration, and, more or less by accident, the Republican candidate was the one ranting against globalization and immigration (despite the fact that the Republican Party has traditionally been the one promoting free trade and opposing immigration reform).
This may be a simplification because it doesn't take into account the
key support that Trump (an incarnation of Satan) received from
the Satanic cults that in the USA are ironically called "evangelicals".
Anyway, i think the theme of the 2020 election will be more about generations,
regardless of college or noncollege education.
The "boomers" (traditionally to the left of the electorate) are retiring and so the older voters, traditionally more conservative, now tend to be evenly distributed between right and left or even leaning towards the left.
The "millennials" grew up during the disasters of the Bush II era: the weapons of mass destructions, the financial crisis, Katrina, you name it. They are the ones who propelled Obama to the presidency. They see Trump as a worse version of Bush II, and they are painfully aware that the election and the senate and the supreme court were all "stolen" from the people: Bush II lost the election to Al Gore, Trump lost the election to Hillary Clinton, the Senate is ruled by the Republicans even though the Democrats get the majority of votes, and the Supreme Court is viewed as full of crooks, fascists and sex offenders appointed by these two unelected presidents.
The millennials are getting old too, and the younger voters (generation Z) make up the generation that is more concerned about climate change, economic inequality and racial injustice.
These two generations will lean to the left for a long time. The Republican Party has moved sharply to the right (basically, it is now little more than a neofascist party) but it will have to move rapidly to the left if it ever wants to win a majority of votes again (the problem is that it has learned that it can twist the constitution and still rule the country even with less than 50% of the votes, but there might be a limit to this).
That leaves the generation between the boomers and the millennials, the much despised "Generation X", the "Xers", people who grew up during the 1970s and 1980s and psychologically feel that left-wing politicians screwed up the country with anarchy and amorality, leaving behind high crime rates, broken families,
million of illegal immigrants, and a general decline in safety and quality of life. And, personally, i think they do have a point in many states of the USA.
They grew up viewing left-wing politicians as incompetent and even dangerous.
They care mostly about the economy and in particular the stock market.
They are skeptic of big government, and for good reasons.
The Xers are the ultimate Trump supporters not because they like Trump but because they are the easiest ones to scare with fearmongering tactics about the danger posed by the Left (Biden is not much of a leftist, but these days that's enough to be considered a communist by many Xers).
I think that this election will show these generational fault lines, and the Gen Xers will be the only group that will vote for Trump and will believe anything Trump will claim about the results being rigged.
So we know who will win the election, but we don't know who will become president.
The election will tell us two things: 1. How strong the US democracy is when it is attacked from the inside; 2. The generational trends of the electorate, which are a good predictor of the future.
As for Trump, he spent most of his four years not protecting the USA from North Korean nuclear missiles and not fighting Russian military expansion in three continents but installing corrupt loyalists in key positions of the government, i.e. creating a "deep state" that would intimidate anyone investigating his dirty deeds and in any case blocking or ignoring the investigation. His attorney general famously distorted the conclusions of the Robert Muller investigation into Trump's collusion with Putin, and then launched a witch hunt against those who contributed to that investigation.
There is a strong chance that, if he loses the elections, Donald Trump will take a plane either to Moscow or to China, the only countries where he doesn't risk being prosecuted and extradited. He may be tempted by his friend the prince of Saudi Arabia, but that country is full of jihadists who would love to behead a former US president. There are friendly semi-despots in places like Brazil and the Philippines, and Trump has a decent reputation in Poland and India, but those are democracies where the government can change at any election. My guess is that, if he loses the election, Trump will not only move to Russia or China but even accept some kind of political or economic position working for their government.
From there, protected from the long arm of US justice, Trump could begin a new career as the leader of the secessionists, encouraging the "red" states to secede and offering himself as their king.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2020 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (august 2020)
What can the USA do to stop the covid massacre?
There is no doubt in my mind that the USA would be faring a lot better (a lot) if Hillary Clinton were president. (Incidentally, coincidence or not, most success stories seem to be associated with female leaders: Germany, Finland, Norway, New Zealand, Taiwan, South Korea). First, you need to listen to the scientists, and just stand behind them 100%. Second, you need to understand numbers and mathematical models (which some low-IQ presidents just can't). Third, you need to enact and enforce laws, and crack down on disinformation and conspiracy theories. If the USA did that, most likely there would be a national lockdown of the kind that Italy went through. Italy lowered its daily death toll from more than 1,000 to less than 5. The opposite happened in the USA. Not wearing a facemask in a crowd should be a federal crime, punishable with several years in prison. Social distancing is actually an option: both Asian and European cities are extremely crowded and social distancing is not practical, but they tamed the virus, at least for now. The biggest problem in the USA from the beginning has been the reluctance to wear a facemask. Then of course the USA needs to have rapid and reliable testing, which (8 months later) still doesn't exist: it took 8 days to get my test result. Obviously it's almost pointless to test people if it takes days to get the result.
If you think that the reasonable solution is to let the virus spread and only protect the vulnerables, we don't really know who is "vulnerable". It could be that everybody is vulnerable as there might be long-term damages even to asymptomatic people.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2020 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
Back to the world news | Top of this page
- (april 2020)
Was covid-19 made in the USA?.
This article has moved here.
- (march 2020)
The Clown & the Virus - Part 2.
(continued from The Clown & the Virus: A Timeline of Trump & Covid-19)
-
In order to give a tax cut to rich corporations and to build a wall to keep illegal immigrants out, Trump in March 2018 disbanded the global health security team, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had to slash by 80% its program to prevent global disease outbreaks. In February 2020 Trump proposed cuts to CDC: cutting Health and Human Services funding by $9.5 billion, including a 15% cut of $1.2 billion to the CDC and a $35 million reduction of the Infectious Diseases Rapid Response Reserve Fund's annual contribution. In 2010 the CDC budget was $12.7bn in current dollars; today it is $8bn. In 2018 Trump defunded and therefore killed a program by the CDC for epidemic prevention activities in 39 countries, including China a program started by Obama in 2014 to prevent ebola from spreading. The CDC director, Tom Frieden, complained publicly that this "would significantly increase the chance an epidemic will spread without our knowledge and endanger lives in our country and around the world."
When in 2017 the Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust and several countries established the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) Trump decided that the USA would not be among the participants: CEPI's goal is to speed up the process of vaccine development.
Trump also killed the Complex Crises Fund, a fund created by then secretary of state Hillary Clinton to deploy disease experts and others in the event of a crisis.
In September 2019 Trump terminates Predict, an international program started in 2009 by Obama designed to alert the USA to potential pandemics caused by viruses that jump from wildlife to humans. Predict, in collaboration with 60 foreign laboratories including the Wuhan Institute of Virology, had identified 1,200 viruses that had the potential to erupt into pandemics, including more than 160 coronaviruses, including the closest known relative of the covid-19 coronavirus. This stopped the work of scores of US scientists who were working to prevent pandemics in countries around the world, including China.
(See A Timeline of Trump & Covid-19 for links to these events).
No wonder that initially only three of the USA's 100 public-health labs were able to test for covid-19 (despite all the warnings that the virus would inevitably spread also in the USA) and that the USA has tested so few people, second only to Iran (Update of March 11: 26 people per million people, compared with South Korea's 4,000 per million and Italy's 1,000 per million - read this report by the Atlantic).
By de-funding what the two previous administrations (Bush's and Obama's) had
created, the Trump administration failed miserably to stock enough masks, gloves, gowns and ventilators (and even toilet paper!) for an emergency.
-
The anxiety in the stock market is perfectly justified. Not because of the
gravity of the covid-19 but because the US government has made all the
possible mistakes. The US government seems to have learned absolutely
nothing from China and Italy and is repeating exactly the same mistakes that China and Italy
made at the beginning of the epidemic.
Donald Trump is behaving precisely like the governor of Hubei
did in December, contradicting and even ridiculing the scientists (just like
he does on climate change).
That's why the stock market is panicking: because the USA is repeating the
same mistakes that China made at the beginning.
And, in general, nobody trusts Trump in a crisis. So far Trump has only faced crises that he himself created, and then he defused them with a lot of chest-thumping and blaming everybody else, but chest-thumping and blaming everybody else is hardly a way to reassure the markets in the face of an epidemic, especially an epidemic that his misleading tweets have contributed to accelerate.
-
Update of March 11: when Trump finally addressed the nation and admitted a national emergency, he spent most of the time congratulating himself for the wonderful job he has done, a fact eerily reminiscent of the Bush administration during the Katrina catastrophe, but the only action that he mentioned was a ban on Europeans, most of whom were not coming anyway, while he said nothing about the 300,000 US citizens who were still in Europe and were much more likely to return to the USA, and initially exempted Britain (perhaps because he owns a golf course there). He also referred to covid-19 as the "China virus", a way to deflect responsibility. Just to be very clear: the covid-19 is spreading in the USA from within. It started with returning US citizens who were infected abroad, e.g. on a cruise ship, and now it is spreading internally (from US resident to US resident). Forget where it originated: this is not a foreign virus anymore, it's a domestic virus spread by US residents to other US residents.
-
Then Trump has continued to disseminate fake news. For example, that a vaccine will be ready soon, that anybody can be tested, and that the antimalarial drug chloroquine can cure covid19 (an Arizona man died and his wife had to be hospitalized after they both followed his suggestion).
-
Trump didn't show any leadership, but mostly blamed everybody else,
pushed conspiracy theories, smeared his political opponents and meanwhile,
just like other dictators, he took advantage of the chaos to pursue his personal
vendettas.
-
Besides government disinformation and inaction, the USA has its own structural problems.
To start with, health care is not free for all. It costs money to get tested
for covid-19, so of course most of us would wait until we are very
(very) sick before we ask to be tested.
The US health care system is a retarded system, and that's the reason why
all sorts of diseases spread faster in the USA than in other countries
where health care is run by the government.
So far the US government has done absolutely nothing to provide free testing and treatment for covid-19, which leaves 27 million uninsured people with zero coverage and the other 270 million at the mercy of their health insurance. Meanwhile, the virus has been spreading undetected in pretty much every state. Then, again, according to Trump to Fox News, this covid-19
is less dangerous than the flu.
Without universal health care, each hospital and doctor can charge what they want, and this becomes a huge cost for both uninsured and insured people.
Some big cities are even reluctant to close public schools, because many poor households rely on the schools for meals to their children and for child care:
European and East Asian countries don't have the large number of destitute families that US cities have (if a Chinese family is poor, most likely it is located in the countryside and grows its own food).
The public infrastructure of China, Italy, South Korea, etc does not exist in the USA. This is the result of three decades of "class warfare" against the middle class and the working class.
Therefore the USA may already have tens of thousands of infected people, who
are spreading the disease in their communities while not being detected.
The USA ends up in the exact same situation as most third-world countries: they
think that they don't have the virus because they are not testing their citizens.
-
Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is correct when he keeps repeating that "we're losing up to 60,000 people who die every year because they don't get to a doctor on time". But, as cruel as it sounds, the USA has to thank that millions of people don't have health insurance and therefore are reluctant to show up at the hospital: the USA doesn't have enough hospitals and doesn't have enough doctors/nurses. The USA gives billions of dollars to the military-industrial complex and doesn't have money to build public hospitals. And restrictive immigration laws make it difficult to hire doctors and nurses from abroad (and the current xenophobic atmosphere discourages them from even wanting to emigrate to the USA).
See also:
The Clown & the Virus: A Timeline of Trump & Covid-19,
Covid-19: How it may change the World
A Timeline of Covid-19
A Summary of Covid-19
TM, ®, Copyright © 2020 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (march 2020)
The Clown & the Virus.
This article has moved here.
- (february 2020)
Amy Klobuchar for President
The logic is simple:
- I have no major issue with the programs of any of the Democratic candidates. In any event, we know that, once they become president, the most daring ideas disappear and they have to bend to the reality of the world. So better judge them based on character than on promises.
- As far as i can tell, she's the most competent of those still running, and she is at least as honest as the most honest of them.
- The greatest accomplishment of the Obama administration was the TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a masterpiece trade deal to integrate the economies of East Asia and North America. The TPP would have created the largest free-trade region in the world and a new bicontinental alliance for the USA. Trump killed the TPP following orders from bis boss Putin. Klobuchar is the last hope that the TPP could be resurrected.
- No more billionaires. There should also have a "wealth" limit. Rich people, no matter how smart they are, don't know much about the world. I traveled in "chicken buses" all over Africa, Latin America, South Asia and the Middle East. I hitchhiked in all continents. I slept in the cheapest hostels and sometimes in the bus. I know how ordinary people live their lives. If you are rich, you don't, and misjudge both the people of your country and the people of the world in general. Period.
- It is time to have a female president of the USA.
- It is also time, after four years, to have a president who pays her taxes, does not run fake foundations and universities, does not surround herself with crooks, releases her tax returns, is not a sex maniac, and is not paid by Russia.
- When i was young, i thought that it was ridiculous that people over 65 have the right to vote. I am now 65 and i haven't changed my mind, especially seeing what most people over 65 are doing. Old people shouldn't have the right to vote just like people under 18 don't have the right to vote. They can certainly discuss, write, advise. But voting for something that will affect the world after they are gone is not fair. And the intellectual abilities of most people over 65 is not any better than the intellectual abilities of people under 18. If only people under 65 and over 18 voted, the world would be very different, and, i believe, better. Make it 70 at best.
- That said, i am also annoyed by political leaders who are over 65. They indirectly tell us "Yes, there are a lot more people in the age group 18-65, but the best qualified person to run the country actually belongs to the tiny minority of people over 65 who are still in good mental and physical health". I'd rather pick one from the much larger population of mentally and physically healthy people between 18 and 65.
That Klobuchar is a serious threat to the fascist establishment is demonstrated by the fact that the fascist media (Fox News and the likes) started demonizing her after ignoring her for months.
Best quote: "I am a mother, so I'm used to balancing things."
Second best: "Courage means standing next to someone you don't always agree with".
Best quote about her: "If you're a woman, whatever your voice or appearance, you qualify for special forms of intolerance" (Caroline Fraser)
Ratings:
Amy Klobuchar (D) 8/10
Elizabeth Warren (D) 7.5/10
Bernie Sanders (D) 7/10
Pete Buttigieg (D) 6.5/10
Joe Biden (D) 6.5/10
Michael Bloomberg (D) 6/10
Bill Weld (R) 6/10
Sedinam Moyowasifza-Curry (G) 6/10
Joe Walsh (R) 5/10
Tom Steyer (D) 5/10
Jo Jorgensen (L) 5/10
Howie Hawkins (G) 4/10
Roque De La Fuente (R) 3/10
Vermin Supreme (L) 2/10
Donald Trump (R) 1/10
Not my fault if there are very few Republicans in the top 10:
the best Republicans are not running.
Who would be the best?
Mia Love 7.5/10
Elise Stefanik 7/10
Joni Ernst 7/10
Susana Martinez 7/10
Susan Collins 7/10
Lisa Murkowski 7/10
John Kasich 7/10
Pete King 7/10
Mitt Romney 7/10
Kristi Noem 7/10
Charlie Baker 7/10
Ana Navarro 6.5/10
Alex Smith 6.5/10
Kevin Faulconer 6.5/10
Larry Hogan 6.5/10
Carly Fiorina 6/10
Nikki Haley 6/10
Condy Rice 6/10
Chris Sununu 6/10
Francis Rooney 6/10
Liz Cheney 6/10
By the way, there are many Democratic politicians that i would prefer to some who are currently running. For example:
Mazie Hirono 8/10
Nancy Pelosi 8/10
Susan Rice 8/10
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez 7.5/10
Adam Schiff 7.5/10
Tammy Duckworth 7.5/10
Charles Schumer 7.5/10
Rashida Tlaib 7.5/10
Gretchen Whitmer 7.5/10
Keisha Lance Bottoms 7.5/10
Gina Raimondo 7.5/10
Michelle Lujan Grisham 7.5/10
Nan Whaley 7.5/10
Kate Brown 7.5/10
Gretchen Whitmer 7.5/10
Greg Fischer 7.5/10
Michael Hancock 7.5/10
John Barrasso 7.5/10
Eric Garcetti 7.5/10
Jennifer Roberts 7.5/10
Aja Brown 7.5/10
Patty Murray 7.5/10
Debbie Stabenow 7.5/10
Jeanne Shaheen 7.5/10
Kirsten Gillibrand 7.5/10
Kamala Harris 7/10
Hillary Schieve 7/10
Sharice Davids 7/10
Ilhan Omar 7/10
Gavin Newsom 7/10
John Bel Edwards 7/10
Marty Walsh 7/10
Ayanna Pressley 7/10
Dianne Feinstein 7/10
TM, ®, Copyright © 2020 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (january 2020)
Open letter to senator Ben Sasse
Ben Sasse, Republican senator from Nebraska, wrote
an article in the Atlantic about China's threat to the free world
("The Responsibility to Counter China's Ambitions Falls to Us" https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/china-sasse/605074/ )
Dear senator,
Everything you wrote about China's repressive system is true, but
how can you criticize China's Communist Party when you are defending a fascist, crook, racist, sex offender, traitor... an utterly immoral person like Trump? and when you obey your senate leader Mitch McConnell in all of his anti-democratic schemes?
Your's party vision of the USA is much scarier to me than Xi's vision of China.
It's a vision of a world under the constant threat of a corrupt dishonest madman armed with nuclear weapons.
If the future of the USA is the one that your party defends daily, may indeed China prevail.
In fact, very soon the world's hope may well be that China prevails before the
Mitch McConnells and the Donald Trumps of this country destroy the world.
You depict the USA as "a nation founded on the idea of human dignity" but you are supporting the methodical dismantling of that idea.
p.s.
I think you missed the irony of something you wrote, where you present
this achievement by the Chinese Communist Party as an evil deed:
"a stunning process through which 850 million people have emerged from poverty since the early 1980s-the largest and fastest poverty reduction in human history, to accompany the largest and fastest economic expansion ever recorded".
I wish your party could claim similar achievements over the same period of time instead of endless warfare and skyrocketing government debt.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2020 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (january 2020)
Trump's Foreign Policy in a Nutshell - Part 3
Russia just announced the world's first hypersonic missile, the Avangard,
capable of avoiding any missile defense of the USA. And China just deployed
its first home-built aircraft carrier, the Shandong.
Trump's response: pick a fight with a small country in the Middle East.
Most of the US public has not heard or quickly forgot the names
"Avangard" and "Shandong", but is now very familiar with the name
"Qasem Soleimani", a general of Iran who meddled in the affairs
of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen (none of these countries border on the
USA, last time we checked).
North Korea just announced that it will resume nuclear tests and missile tests,
including a new strategic weapon.
Trump's response: pick a fight with Iran, that years ago suspended nuclear
tests and signed a treaty with the USA, Europe, Russia and China allowing
international inspectors into its country.
Most of the US public didn't have time to absorb the news that North Korea
will soon be able to strike the USA with nuclear-armed missiles,
but is now very familiar with the fact that this
Qasem Soleimani was a "bad man" of Iran (a far-away country that has no way to strike the USA).
First of all, Trump has a unique ability to
elevate a regional trouble-maker to great-power status.
North Korea and Iran are suddenly treated like world powers by US media
thanks to the attention that Trump devoted to them and to the fact
that they routinely outsmart him.
Secondly, it's useful to remember who started the fight. It was Trump who
threatened North Korea with "fire and fury like the world has never seen".
North Korea's dictator understood that part well and prepared the country
so that it could in turn unleash on the USA "fire and fury like the world
has never seen". He may not be the smartest fat boy in the world, but he
is not stupid.
And it was Trump,
in May 2018,
who unilaterally decided to withdraw the USA from the nuclear treaty signed
by Obama
(and Russia, China and the Europeans) with Iran that halted Iran's nuclear
program. Every international and US observer agrees that, at that time,
Iran was in full compliance with the treaty.
Iran's initial reaction was surprisingly responsible: instead of threatening
retaliation against the USA, Iran simply tried to keep good relations
with the Europeans, i.e. to create a wedge between the USA and the US allies
that Trump routinely insults (in other words, a wedge that Trump himself
has created).
But then, in April 2019, Trump also imposed an international embargo on
Iran's exports of its own oil, sanctions that are truly crippling for
the Iranian economy. Trump himself called them "maximum pressure". If you exert
maximum pressure on someone, you can't expect that someone to simply suffer
in silence. Iran began to retaliate against US allies in the region the only
way it can: with small-scale attacks (note the word "small") launched by its
proxy militias against Saudi Arabia and with rockets that killed a grand total
of 1 (one) US citizen in Iraq and maybe (maybe) a total of 20 people across
the region. Any mass shooter in the USA has killed more
US citizens than all of Qasem Soleimani's militias combined.
For what it's worth,
Qasem Soleimani's Quds Force helped the USA to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan
in 2001, and certainly rejoiced when the USA in 2003 ousted Saddam Hussein,
the madman who had tried to invade Iran in 1980 and who was oppressing the
Shiite majority of Iraq.
Suleimani became an enemy of the USA when the USA decided to protect
the Mujahedeen Khalq, a group funded by Saddam Hussein considered
a terrorist group by Iran.
Nonetheless, until recently Qasem Soleimani's Quds Force was working in
coordination with the USA in fighting ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
(Note: ISIS, just like the Taliban and Al Qaeda, was born with support
from Saudi Arabia, which has never been punished for the 2001 attacks in the
USA by Al Qaeda and for all the terrorist attacks carried out by ISIS in
the world, let alone for many murdered dissident including a US journalist).
The issue is not whether this Qasem Soleimani was a bad person or not.
There are many bad people in the world. It doesn't mean the USA should
assassinate all of them. Incidentally, most of the world (including me) thinks
that Donald Trump is a bad man, and a very dangerous one.
The issue is that this assassination simply continues the US policy of
creating more and more conflict with Iran, and this only seems to serve the
interests of the Islamic dictatorship of Saudi Arabia and of the rogue
prime minister of Israel, not the interests of the people of the USA
(See The biggest scam in the Middle East: Israel's war on Iran and
Bombing Saudi Arabia: an Act of War or a Moral Duty?).
The following day, Trump said "We took action last night to stop a war... not to start a war." That statement may become as famous as Bush's "Mission accomplished".
Putin is certainly happy to see the USA mired (yet again) in a Middle East conflict while he expands Russia's influence in every corner of the world, from
Venezuela (where he has strengthened Maduro's regime with no opposition from
Trump) to Syria (where Trump has abandoned the US allies to be slaughtered
by joint Russian and Turkish aggression).
Now that Trump is president, Putin is basically taking an endless victory lap.
For mysterious reasons (i'm being sarcastic), Trump's actions always seem
to help Russia and hurt the USA.
Trump is either incredibly stupid or incredibly corrupt. Or, more likely, both.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2020 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (january 2020)
Trump's Foreign Policy in a Nutshell - Part 2
Two months ago i wrote
Trump's Foreign Policy in a Nutshell.
It didn't take long for some of those predictions to come true.
A few days ago Putin announced that Russia now has the first hypersonic
missile. It was probably coming anyway, but it is a direct consequence
of Trump's withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
It is now perfectly legitimate for Russia and anyone else to develop such
missiles. Given that both China and the Europeans are more technologically
advanced than Russia, it is just a matter of time before they too will
develop the same hypersonic missiles. These are rockets that can hit
anywhere in the USA and cannot be stopped by any missile defense system.
We don't really know why "Vladimir" Trump withdrew from the ABMT. It could be just
Mussolini-style bravado. It could be that he followed orders from Putin
(as usual). It could be that someone convinced such a gullible incompetent
president that the USA needed to test new defense systems without realizing
that this simply encouraged the "enemy" to develop better offensive
systems. Whatever missile defense the Pentagon was trying to develop,
it is now useless against Russian missiles.
A few days later an Iran-backed Shiite militia organized a mass demonstration
against the USA in Baghdad that culminated with the partial occupation of
the US embassy. Nobody got killed but the message was clear: "if we want,
we can kill the entire staff of the US embassy in Iraq".
Since Trump rescinded Obama's treaty with Iran, Iran has been posting one
victory after the other, openly challenging the USA anywhere in the Middle
East, even shooting down a US spy drone. Now it is flexing its muscles inside
Iraq, a country that the USA "liberated" from Saddam Hussein at the cost of
one trillion dollars and thousands of lives. Iraq is currently with no
government after the resignation of the prime minister, following widespread
riots against corruption. It's the ideal time for Iran to influence Iraq's
domestic politics. Trump ordered the bombing of this Iran-backed militia
which resulted in the death of 24 people. And this offered the perfect pretext
for Iran to stir up nationalistic pride among the Iraqi population.
Now the USA has a much bigger problem: not only Iran is stirring up trouble
all over the Middle East, but now there is a good chance that Iraq will
become more aligned with Iran than it ever was in its 5,000-year history.
A few days later the other pillar of Trump's foreign policy collapsed.
Jong-un Kim, the dictator of tiny and poor North Korea, announced live on
television that North Korea will "mass-produce nuclear warheads and ballistic missiles".
He reiterated that North Korea will resume nuclear and missile tests.
It is likely that this year North Korea will test a missile capable of hitting
California.
Trump was duped by Kim into believing that there was a path to denuclearize
North Korea. He is so dumb he might still believe it. North Korea's plan has
always been clear and actually widely publicized by North Korea's leaders
themselves: become a nuclear power and annex South Korea with its formidable
economy
(See What North Korea really wants).
Then the unified Korea under the Kim dictatorship will be one of
the world's most powerful nations. It sounded like a madman's dream when
Kim's grandfather was talking about it. Under Trump's watch, this madman's
dream has now become a very realistic scenario.
North Korea's plan has always been to build nuclear weapons and missiles capable of striking the USA, and lots of both.
Finally, the crown in "Vladimir" Trump's foreign policy has been the dismantling of the
Atlantic alliance. Trump supported Brexit and weakened NATO to the point that
the latest NATO meeting, held in Britain itself, was mainly a declaration
of "each man for his own". It ended with world leaders making fun of Trump
and Trump insulting everybody as usual, convinced that he is a "very stable
genius" gifted with "immense wisdom" when everybody treats him like a fool.
A video that went viral shows British prime minister Boris Johnson, French president Emmanuel Macron, Canada's prime minister Justin Trudeau and Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte making fun of Trump's childish behavior during the summit.
The one who was certainly amused was his master Putin: Russia has never
looked so powerful now that NATO is disintegrating.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2020 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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