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- (december 2007)
Yet another terrorist attack in the USA.
The largest terrorist organization in the world, the NRA (National Rifle
Association), has killed again: eight people were killed in a Omaha shopping
mall by a 20-year old man who proudly displayed his gun-loving ideology.
It is the second mass shooting at a mall this year, after an 18-year old killed
five people in Salt Lake City. As more and more deadly guns becomes available
to more and more people, does anybody really expect that these numbers
will start going down? A class of corrupt politicians (veritable traitors)
have sold the security of USA citizens to the gun lobby.
USA citizens will keep dying like flies
until someone starts fighting terrorism for real (not the terrorists in distant
countries but terrorists that train right in the USA, right in their backyards,
right in your woods). The massacre continues. And the politicians do nothing,
or even praise it.
Impeach the whole political class for not taking on the terrorists of the NRA.
(Also see The largest terrorist organization in the world kills 32 USA citizens,
Baghdad, USA
The real terrorists strike again in the USA, etc etc).
- (december 2007)
Wrong again.
In 2002 the Bush administration told the whole world that Saddam Hussein's Iraq
was relentlessly working on "weapons of mass destruction", that the United
Nations inspectors did not find them because they were a bunch of incompetent
idiots, that France was "old" and stupid for opposing the invasion of Iraq.
Their friendly media, notably the Republican cheerleaders at Fox News
(Bill O'Reilly, Sean Connity, etc), launched a witch hunt that created consensus
for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Guess what.
It turned out that there were no WMDs, that the Bush inspectors reached the
identical conclusions that the United Nations inspectors had reached (all WMDs
had long been destroyed by Saddam Hussein), and that France was right.
The credibility of the USA was literally annihilated.
Over the last few years Bush and his master Dick Cheney have been telling the
whole world that Iran was working relentlessly on building a nuclear weapon.
They cited overwhelming evidence with the same fanatical certainty that they
displayed in 2002 over Iraq's WMDs. This time the world was more willing to
listen: the Europeans (having undergone significant political changes under
new leaders) stood solidly behind the USA, even France and Germany. The opposition to the USA campaign
of sanctions against Iran came from Russia, whose experts claimed that Iran
posed no immediate threat to anyone, and from China, that wondered openly what
all the fuss was about. In december 2005 Dick Cheney stated unequivocally that
"there's good reason to believe that Iran continues to aggressively pursue the development of a nuclear weapon." Russia's skepticism was scorned by both
officials and the Bush cheerleaders on Fox News. Fox News openly derided the
IAEA, the United Nations organization that concluded time and again that there
was no evidence of a recent nuclear weapons program in Iran.
Guess what. In december 2007 a CIA report reveals that Iran halted its nuclear
program years ago and that, even if it restarted it, it is not even close
to building a nuclear bomb. At best they will have a nuclear bomb in 2015.
This is an insignificant threat compared with the number of countries around
the world that could get a bomb before then, if they decide to do so.
Thus Russia and the IAEA were right (yet again),
Fox News was wrong (as usual) and the credibility of the
USA plunged a bit further down. One wonders if Bush and Cheney and Fox News
work for the enemy and have a plan to continuously harm the USA on the world
stage. So far no enemy has caused more damage to the USA than them.
Needless to say, international support for sanctions against Iran has
dissipated overnight. Needless to say, the next time the USA will claim that
anyone is building any sort of weapon of mass destruction the whole world
will laugh. Russia's envoy declared "We have always been saying that there is no
proof that they are pursuing nuclear weapons". Fox News did not even report it.
So much for sore losers.
The rest of the world hailed the report with a sigh of relief. This time the
"mistake" was discovered before the USA dropped thousands of bombs on a country,
before tens of thousands of civilians died.
The Western Europeans are now puzzled. The timing of the CIA report (just days
before the United Nations was scheduled to vote new sanctions against Iran)
makes them look silly at best. This time the USA had France and Germany on its
side.
The France of Sarkozy looks positively naive compared with the France of Chirac,
who stood against Bush throughout the Iraqi crisis.
The Germany of Merkel looks positively naive compared with the Germany of Schroeder,
who stood against Bush throughout the Iraqi crisis.
Why in heaven would the USA derail this process and embarrass its won allies?
The release of the report must have been authorized by Bush in person.
It will take months to understand what in heaven went on inside the Bush
administration. Even someone as hapless as Bush must have been aware that
this means the de facto termination of any trust between his government and
the European allies (or, for that matter, any kind of ally).
One can speculate that the timing of the report may be meaningful from the
point of view of Iraq and Annapolis. The USA has been talking to Iran about
limiting their interference in Iraq, notably reducing the flow of weapons
into Iraq. The USA has not invited Iran to the peace talks at Annapolis
between Israelis and Palestinians, but the USA is aware (like everybody else)
that Iran is very much part of the equation, being the main sponsor of the
two groups opposed to peace with Israel (Hamas and Hezbollah). There is going
no security in Irag unless Iran agrees, and there is going no peace for
Israel unless Iran agrees. Under the leadership of Condy Rice, the Bush
administration has shifted its attitude from military threats to diplomacy.
The sticking point with Iran was the nuclear issue, that, once set in motion,
was not easy to stop. Maybe this report was timed by someone who wanted
more diplomacy and less isolation for Iran, in the hope that this will help
Iraq and the Palestinians.
The report also comes at a time when Iran's president Ahmadinejad is under
attack by both liberals and conservatives in his own country. Relenting the
pressure on the nuclear pressure might help the opposition gain popular
support (the Iranian public is widely siding with Ahmadinejad on the nuclear
issue: if Israel has nuclear weapons, and even Pakistan has them, why
shouldn't Iran that is completely surrounded by enemies?)
TM, ®, Copyright © 2007 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (november 2007)
The state of the Bush economy.
House prices are likely to keep falling for a while, as fewer and fewer
households can afford them and fewer and fewer banks will be willing to
fund those households crazy enough to want to borrow the money.
The dollar has sunk to historic laws against every currency you can name,
whether European, Asian, Middle Eastern or Latin American. This makes USA
citizens poorer than their counterparts abroad, but also makes USA goods
cheaper for those counterparts to buy. The trade deficit has slowly improved
but it is still a far cry from getting even. The USA still imports a lot more
than it exports. Therefore the dollar is likely to continue its decline.
It also reflects the realignment of wealth. As USA households get poorer
and foreign households get richer, the relative value of the currency simply
reflects that trend. The Japanese yen has tripled in value since the 1960s,
when Japan was a poor country.
Stocks are expensive by any standard. They are at least 20% more expensive
than they should be if they simply reflected the probability of return
(see for example this article).
Basically, anyone who holds a stock right now is betting in an economic boom
in 2008, when in fact all economists are predicting a slow-down if not
a full-fledged recession. Those who hold high-tech stock are betting that those
high-tech companies (such as Google) will double or triple their revenues and
profits in the next two or three years. It will soon become apparent that
those companies will have trouble even maintaining the current profits.
House prices, stocks and the dollar are therefore likely to keep declining
for a while. For foreign investors the only good news is that USA assetts
are becoming cheaper by the day. If you want to own a piece of the USA economy
(whether a skyscraper or a bank), this is the best time ever to buy.
Basically, we are witnessing a giant sale of the whole USA.
For USA citizens, the only good news is that a cheaper dollar will create
more demand for USA goods, i.e. growing international business.
With a different government (that cared for the middle class) this could
translate into a boom of small businesses. Alas, the Bush administration has
consistently penalized small businesses to favor their friends in the big
multinationals.
It might be inevitable that the USA gets poorer while the developing world
gets richer (the same way than in the 1980s the USA got poorer while Japan
got richer), but the world economy might pay a huge price. The world is still
too dependent on the USA. No economist can fully evaluate the effect that
300 million poorer USA citizens will have on the rest of the world.
The euro might be the strongest currency in the world, but
European stocks still routinely ape the behavior of USA stocks.
The average Japanese and South Korean household might now be richer than the
average USA household (once you subtract the debts) but it is still the USA
household that Japanese and South Korean companies depend on.
The economies of the developing world might be growing at a fast rate, but
millions of their jobs have been created (directly on indirectly) by
USA multinationals.
The world's economy of 2007 is, ultimately, the USA economy, with everybody
else, from oil producers to shoe manufacturers, being cogs in its huge
clockwork. The shock wave of a poorer USA might be felt for generations to
come in every corner of the world.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2007 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (november 2007)
Iraq and the presidential candidates.
Iraq was the main issue when the Democratic presidential hopefuls started
campaigning. Now the Democrats would rather not talk about it.
Many suspect that the Democrats were betting on a humiliating defeat in Iraq,
and now are taken aback by the success of the surge (that they bitterly
criticized). As the situation improves, they are beginning to contemplate
the nightmarish possibility that the public will see them as too ready to
surrender. Had it been for Nancy Pelosi, the USA would have already left Iraq
and added another defeat to its record of military failures (Korea, Vietnam,
Lebanon, Somalia). Had it been for Nancy Pelosi, the civil war in Iraq would
still be out of control. Thanks to the Republicans, instead, things have
improved. While Iraq is far from being a peaceful place yet, it finally looks
like the USA does have a chance of coming out of this adventure as a winner,
not a loser. If the situation keeps improving, Iraq will be a deadly issue
for the Democrats, who will increasingly look like the ones who wanted to
surrender.
However, the public is not rewarding the one man who was right about the surge:
John McCain. He always criticized the president for not sending enough troops
to maintain order in Iraq. He was the one who consistently advocated a surge
and predicted that it would reduce both sectarian violence (i.e., civilian
casualties) and USA casualties. Statistics show that, so far, he was right on
both counts. The public has not given him credit for being the one who had
the right strategy. Republican voters are more in love with flip-floppers
like Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani, who never really articulated any strategy
for Iraq.
The bottom line is that Iraq is not an issue that would determine the winner,
but it might determine the loser. Democrats have a tendency to lose elections
that they should have easily won. Just a few months ago it looked like the
Republicans had no chance of winning the presidential election, given the
unpopularity of George W Bush. The Democrats thought they were smart to
seize the issue of Iraq and run with it. Even Hillary Clinton (who had voted
in favor of the war) joined the ranks of those calling for a troop withdrawal.
It may have been a fatal mistake.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2007 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (october 2007)
Bush is still dragging his feet on Iraq.
It took Bush a long time to admit that the situation in Iraq was getting worse,
not better. It took Bush a long time to admit that Rumsfeld was the problem,
not the solution. It took Bush a long time to admit that the USA did not have
enough troops in Iraq. Each and every time Bush dragged his feet until nothing
could possibly help him anymore. By that time, thousands of Iraqi and USA lives
had been lost.
(The average number of people killed declined from more than 100 before the "surge" of USA troops to an all-time low of four on the 12th of october 2007).
There is now an obvious remedy to the ridiculous situation of the Iraqi
government, that does not even control Baghdad: federalism. It may not be
the only solution, but it is the one that is de facto being implemented on
the field while the USA still formally recognizes prime minister Maliki as
the leader of all
Iraq. The very USA army is applying different strategies in different regions
and making different kinds of deals with the regional leaders. Maliki can hardly
visit any place outside Baghdad without risking his life. And he'd be ignored
anyway.
Both Iraq's president Jalal Talabani, who hails from Kurdistan, and Ammar
al-Hakim, a political leader of the largest Shiite party, favor a federalist
solution. In the USA the movement in favor of the federal solution was started
by senator Joe Biden and vehemently opposed only by the Bush administration.
Bush has few allies on this issue, and not the kind he would like to have:
the Sunni terrorists oppose the idea because it would leave Sunnis the middle
of Iraq, which is the poorest of natural resources; Al Sadr opposes it on
principle, but probably because he still dreams of becoming the Iranian-backed
dictator of the whole Iraq;
Maliki's Dawa Party opposes it on principle as well, but probably
because it would reduce the corruption of the centralized government and
therefore their own power.
Bush indirectly helped the Sunni insurgents become an organized and deadly
force in Iraq. Bush indirectly helped the Shiite militias become powerful
armies. Bush indirectly helped them kill each other by the thousands.
It is too late to dream of a truly united Iraq.
If the West split Yugoslavia to stop a bloody civil war, why not split Iraq?
TM, ®, Copyright © 2007 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (october 2007)
Terrorists kill 17,000 USA citizens.
In october alone, first a sheriff's deputy killed six people at a party and
then a 14-year-old suspended student opened fire in a Cleveland high school killing five people.
All of this thanks to the guns made available by the
"gun lobby", mostly run by the National Rifle Asspciation (NRA), the largest
terrorist organization in the world.
The FBI just published
its report about violent crime in 2006: 17,034 people were murdered in just one year.
Last year Iraqi insurgents killed a little over 800 USA soldiers.
The NRA is a lot more deadly than the Iraqi insurgents, or, for that matter,
Iran, that disn't kill any USA citizen at all.
Senator John McCain once joked "bomb bomb bomb Iran". How about we target first
the ones who kill us for real, day after day?
See also The terrorists rule the USA
TM, ®, Copyright © 2007 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (september 2007)
The ever-expanding axis of evil.
Bush began his career of international demagogue by declaring war on three
regimes: Iraq, Iran and North Korea. North Korea went on to become a nuclear
power. Iran has become the symbol of anti-USA sentiment across the Islamic
world. Iraq has become the USA's worst nightmare.
The success of the old axis of evil is perhaps not as embarrassing for the
Bush administration as its expansion. More and more countries are joining the
axis of evil. Besides Cuba, Burma, Belarus, Sudan, Zimbabwe and Syria (who were already
evil at
the time but were somehow overlooked for a few years), free elections have
installed several democratically-elected anti-USA heads of state which represent
a much thornier problem: Chavez in Venezuela, Ortega in Nicaragua (the same
Ortega that president Reagan fought via the Contras), Morales in Bolivia,
Hamas in Palestine, and a few moderate leftist governments in Latin America
(Brazil, Argentina, Chile).
Not to mention an ever more hostile Russia and an ever more threatening China.
Most of these leaders enjoy approval ratings that are
far higher than Bush's own approval rating.
The only good news for Bush has come from Western Europe (Sarkozy and Merkel
replacing Chirac and Schroeder), from Canada (with the victory of the conservatives), from Australia (landslide of the conservative prime minister), from India
(now a strategic USA ally) and from a few vastly unpopular dictators who are
still in power thanks to USA military aid (from Pakistan to Egypt).
Most of the rest of the world has been slipping away rather than rallying
around the USA.
Despite what the cheerleaders of the Bush administration (such as Fox News)
claim, Ahmadinejad and Chavez are probably the most successful members
of the new axis of evil. They are the most outspoken critics of the USA and
they have both become magnets of anti-USA sentiments in their respective
regions.
Ahmadinejad is a hero for most of the Islamic world, that sees him as the
rare Islamic leader who stands up to Western arrogance and promotes the
conspiracy theories that are popular in the Middle East.
Chavez is a hero for large sectors of the Latin American world that views
the USA as a bunch of corrupt, brutal and greedy exploiters of the people
(and haven't forgotten tens of thousands of victims of USA-sponsored
dictatorships).
They are both serious thorns because they amplify popular beliefs about the
evil nature of the USA. It is not true that they simply feed on pre-existing
anti-USA sentiment: they also create their own following.
Their propaganda seems to be more effective than the old propaganda of the
Soviet Union.
And they are not isolated at all.
Ahmadinejad and Chavez can do what they do because they have oil, lots of oil,
in a world that the USA turned into a voracious consumer of oil.
Other world leaders would love to do the same but they don't have oil.
The fact that they cannot afford to speak out does not mean that they and
their constituencies do not sympathyze with the axis of evil. Many of them do,
and routinely give standing ovations to the likes of
Ahmadinejad and Chavez at the United Nations.
That the axis of evil is winning is obvious. The USA can do very little to
influence the countries who become members of the axis. The countries of the
axis, on the other hand, are able to wreak havoc in the rest of the world:
Iran is winning in Iraq, and has turned Lebanon and Palestine (two examples
of the USA push towards democratic regimes) into battlefields; Venezuela is
funding and supporting anti-USA candidates all over Latin America. Both are
winning more and more allies in the developing world with a combination of
oil money and ideological propaganda.
Bush's axis of evil has been so far a staggering debacle. The ranks of this
axis of evil are swelling by the day.
And, yet, Bush seems to be completely oblivious to the fact that he is more
and more isolated around the world, while his enemies are making more and more
friends around the world. As it has always been the case with his
administration, Bush lives in denial of something that is very visible.
Therefore he is not doing anything to remedy the problem.
When you refuse to admit that there is a problem, you will not find the
solution and the problem will only get bigger and bigger. That has been
Bush's story from Al Qaeda to Iraq to the Katrina hurricane to the cronies
he appointed in Washington.
Ironically, the country that was behind the 2001 terrorist attacks and that
is behind the worldwide spreading of Islamic fundamentalism has never made
it to the axis of evil: Saudi Arabia.
They are the ones printing textbooks that invite children to despire non-Muslims.
They are the ones funding and providing bodies for the Sunni insurgency in Iraq.
They are the ones funding and providing bodies for the Taleban in Afghanistan.
They are the ones who rush to help any Muslim anywhere in the world who is
willing to blow up civilians for whatever grievance.
They are the ones whom Bush has always condoned.
One has to wonder if the conspiracy theories that are ubiquitous in the Middle
East couldn't perhaps contain a grain of truth, that Bush engineered the 2001
terrorist attacks in cahoots with Saudi Arabia. Either that, or utter stupidity.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2007 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (september 2007)
How the anti-immigration crusade is crippling the middle class.
The damage that antipimmigration demagogues are causing to the USA is
staggering.
Because of them, Congress has not changed the quota for labor
permits. Because of the quota, we are sending back thousands of brilliant
scientists. We are literally doing the opposite of what we used to do. We used
to "steal" the best brains from all the countries in the world. Now we train
them and then we literally force them to leave the USA. Most of them go to
Europe and the Far East, where they are welcome. They have to leave the USA not
because they want to but because
there is no way that their sponsors can hire them legally.
There are also thousands of brilliant scientists who have obtained the labor
visa after being sponsored by USA companies, but they still choose to go
back to their countries because the green-card process is just too
humiliating. Thanks to the anti-immigration fanatics.
On the other hand, the middle class is struggling to cope with skyrocketing
health-care costs. Families are literally letting their sick ones die
alone because they cannot afford a nurse. Only very rich people (like
the anti-immigrant demagogues themselves) can afford it.
Ordinary people rely on the illegal immigrants that anti-immigrant demagogues
hate so much
in order to provide their loved ones with adequate day and night care.
The witch hunt unleashed by the anti-immigration fanatics has scared the
middle class away from this cheap (and often more professional) form of
assistance, but now the middle class cannot afford the "legal" ones (meaning
the legalized robberies of nursing homes, day care centers, etc), which in
fact becoming more expensive by the day (not having to compete with the
cheaper illegal immigrants anymore).
And, again, we are sending back to their countries the good, honest, kind,
hard-working illegal immigrants who were providing a desperately needed
service to the middle class.
The anti-immigration crusaders are literally killing the middle class.
They are happy that we send back brilliant foreigners
so that idiots like them and their children can still get a job.
These anti-immigration crusaders and the crooks in Congress that they support
are not just idiots: they are traitors.
To borrow an expression coined by one of them, they are
the ones conducting a war on the middle class.
Unfortunately, they are winning the war.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2007 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (september 2007)
Harry Reid is the enemy.
Washington has more corrupt politicians than Osama has suicide bombers.
That is one reason why we should look for the enemy among us before we look
for the enemy abroad. And sometimes fanaticism of a different sort than the
Islamic one can cause more damage to the USA.
The USA (and the world in general) desperately needs nuclear power. It is
the only form of energy that can substitute fossil fuels and even reduce
harmful gas emissions. Even the most fanatical of the anti-nuclear
fundamentalists are beginning to accept reality. The one problem that the
nuclear industry has not solved yet is what to do with the nuclear waste.
No country has come up with an adequate solution. The USA did. The USa
identified an old nuclear test site in Nevada as the ideal place to bury
nuclear waste for one million years. It would be the safest disposal ever
of nuclear waste.
Except that Harry Reid, the powerful Democratic senator, is from Nevada.
He has boycotted the whole project (offering neither a decent explanation nor
a decent alternative), simply on the grounds that he has the power to do it.
Meanwhile nuclear waste is being piled up, day after day, in much less safe
containers in much less safe sites. If one of those containers leaks nuclear
waste, or if one of those sites is infiltrated by a terrorist,
Reid will certainly blame the nuclear industry for the incident. But we
all know who is the real enemy.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2007 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (september 2007)
Arnold Schwarzenegger, global warmer
The former actor and current governor of California,
Arnold Schwarzenegger, has frequently boasted of having presided over the
greenest laws passed in the world since the global-warming scare started.
At the same time, Arnold Schwarzenegger has launched a project to modernize
the aging communication infrastructure of California and, having the imagination
of a second-rate actor, has mostly focused that effort on expanding the size
of the existing highways (instead of, for example, expanding public
transportation). What his advisors failed to explain to him is that one of
the main causes of climate change around the world has been and still is:
deforestation. Deforestation is responsible for about 25% of all carbon
emissions entering the Earth's atmosphere.
California's highways were famous for the thousands of trees that were planted
in the median dividing the two senses of direction.
Schwarzenegger's modernization plan entails cutting them down, all of them,
to make room for extra lanes. Freeway 280 connecting San Jose to San Francisco
used to have a sign that said "the world's most beautiful freeway". The reason
was the endless line of colorful oleanders and other trees that stretched
all the way to San Francisco. No more. These were tens of thousands of trees,
the equivalent of a little forest. The trees have been serially cut down.
A fitting symbol of Schwarzenegger's deforestation plan is the barren, yellowish
landscape that now stands out next to the freeway. Ditto for freeway 99 to
Fresno.
This case of state-mandated state-wide deforestation is particularly serious
in California, a state that penalizes home-owners who plant trees: as a state
that is chronically short of water for its citizens, California charges higher
rates to home-owners that consume more water. Needless to say, this does not
encourage anyone to keep trees on their property, let alone to plant new trees.
The net effect of Schwarzenegger's policies will be to cause a staggering
loss of green in California.
It is yet another case of politicians' hypochrisy and/or incompetence.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2007 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (september 2007)
Let's not get over it.
In 2001 George W Bush became president of the USA on a technicality: he won
the electoral college despite having lost the popular vote. More people voted
for Al Gore than George W Bush, and many more people voted for the candidates of the Left (Gore plus Ralph Nader) than for the candidates of the Right (Bush plus Buchanan). The will of the people was clearly ignored.
Since then, nothing has been done to change the Constitution and rectify this
anomaly: a candidate can become president even if that candidate was voted
by fewer people than another candidate.
Since then, in fact, both Republicans and Democrats have been trying to tweak
the technicality so that their candidates would have an advantage, regardless
of how many votes they actually get from actual voters.
This can hardly be called a democracy.
After Bush got elected, Republicans kept saying "get over it", as if the whole
business was not worth discussing. It is very much worth discussing. In fact,
little else is worth discussing. Either the USA is a democracy or it is not.
Right now, it is not.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2007 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (august 2007)
The Republican Sex Machine.
Not many Republicans seem to be immune to a wild sex life, that the most
liberal Democrats must envy. The list of "sex scandals" in the Republican Party
is very long since they won and rewon the majority in Congress. However, most of
them simply reveal the disgusting arrogance of elected politicians, regardless
of party affiliation. More telling is how little publicity surrounded the
confession by former House speaker Newt Gingrich that he was having an
extramarital affair with a congressional aide during the same period of time that former president Bill Clinton was being impeached by Congress (then dominated by Gingrich's Republican Party) for an extramarital affair with intern Monica Lewinsky.
This will hopefully educate
naive members of the Republican Party who thought that the Republican Party was
defending the moral values of the USA when, under Gingrich's leadership, they
persecuted Bill Clinton.
It is also telling that the Republican Party's best known candidates for
president, Rudy Giuliani and Newt Gingrich, have both been married three times.
No candidate from the Democratic Party can boast of such an exciting sex life.
Gingrich just published a book titled "Rediscovering God in America."
Are the register voters of the USA "that" dumb?
TM, ®, Copyright © 2007 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (august 2007)
The middle class is still getting poorer.
According to data released in august 2007 by the Internal Revenue Service,
USA taxpayers earned a smaller average income in 2005 than in 2000.
Bush can be proud that this is the fifth consecutive year that average income
declines in the USA. He may go down as the only president during whose
eight-year tenure the standard of living in the USA consistently declined.
The numbers are even more devastating if one does not consider the wealthy
portion of the population, whose income increased and therefore tends to
increase the national average
(the growth in total incomes was concentrated among those making more than $1 million).
The income of the middle-class has simply collapsed.
At the same time, the cost of living has more than doubled in many areas
that affect the middle class: health care, education, gasoline.
Remember Bush's tax cut? Statistics now show that
28% of the savings went to just 11,433 of the 134 million taxpayers of the USA,
namely those who earn $10 million or more, saving them almost $1.
This small group of wealthy citizens saved some $21.7 billion in taxes thanks
to the Bush tax cut.
On the other hand, the nearly 90% of USA citizens who earn less than $100,000
a year (51% of whom were dumb enough to vote for Bush) saved on average of
$318 each thanks to the Bush tax cut.
It will take a generation to undo the damage that Bush has caused to the USA
economy. It will probably take even longer for the middle class of the USA
to get out of the tunnel. But then wasn't the middle class that voted Bush
into power in the first place? We got what we deserved. Maybe we will learn
to switch off Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, and start reading the New York Times
and watching Michael Moore's documentaries.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2007 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (july 2007)
How the Internet monopolies crippled the USA.
Throughout the 1990s the USA was the ruler of the Internet. In fact, the
vast majority of websites, services and sales were based in the USA.
The rest of the world accounted for a tiny portion of the whole Internet world
and traffic. Those were the happy days when people used "dial up" (i.e.
a regular phone line) to get on the Internet. The reason the USA led the world
was that, quite simply, regulations forced phone companies to compete. This
kept the prices for dial-up very low and service very good. I was rarely
unable to get on line: each provider was providing so many phone numbers to
call if one was not working, and, in any event, it was so easy to switch
between hundreds of competing providers. (It still is, if you are willing
to live with dial-up).
Then came the Bush administration and their corrupt officials. They were told
by the big telecommunication corporations to make sure that competition would
not spoil their party. The Bush officials obeyed and crippled competition in
the key area of high-speed Internet. At the same time, the rest of the world
was regulating the industry precisely to achieve the opposite: more competition
among providers of high-speed Internet and, if necessary, government
intervention to guarantee that every citizen would be able to use a high-speed
connection to get online.
No surprise that in 2007 most European and Far Eastern countries have passed
the USA as percentage of the population that has a high-speed Internet
line. No surprise that, even at a higher cost, high-speed Internet service is
lousy in the USA. Most USA citizens are stuck with one provider.
If you don't like Comcast, your only alternative is to go back to dial-up.
(And virtually nobody but Comcast employees likes Comcast's service and their prices).
Limiting competition to favor their cronies in the telecommunication industry
appeared to be merely yet another manifestation of the Bush administration's
chronic corruption, but it turns out to have created a serious problem for
the country: it has sent the USA to the second tier of nations in the race
towards the digital world. The USA is now 25th in the world, and it is below
the average of the developed world. A decade ago it was not only first, but
the gap between the first and the second was colossal.
It doesn't take much to cause the downfall of an empire.
See this report
TM, ®, Copyright © 2007 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (july 2007)
The Democratic debates.
Never has a presidential campaign started so early. While this makes money even
more important, it also allows for a long series of debates which are having
a beneficial effect: we get to know more of the candidates before the
party-manipulated caucuses and primaries.
Bill Richardson is the favorite of the greatest terrorist organization in the world, the National Rifle Association. Enough said.
Barack Obama cannot answer (in a straight manner) the simplest questions: he answers by a collage of stereotypical sentences that mean absolutely nothing.
Joe Biden has a record in the Senate that speaks volumes on why he should not be president.
Hillary Clinton is perhaps the most competent of the batch, but sounds more like a well-prepared student than a compassionate leader. She leaves the impression that she will be driven by special interests no less than the last few presidents, and that there are scant chances that she will care for ordinary people. Last but not least, do Americans truly want another dynasty after the Bushes?
That leaves John Edwards, whose private life is not always consistent with his public stand, but at least seems to embrace all the right causes and really mean them. He may not be as competent as some of the others, but he might be the one who best represents the will of the people.
The biggest problem that the Democratic Party has is that none of its
credible candidates can be trusted with change. None of them really wants
to change. They are candidates because of the existing system.
They have no interest to change the system, otherwise they would all be
unemployed (or employed in more decent jobs).
The Democratic candidates have to explain why, seven months after they won
the last parliamentary election, absolutely nothing has changed in the USA.
No universal health care, no immigration reform, no change in Iraq, etc.
They keep blaming the president, as if Congress had no power and they were
mere spectators of what the president does, which is, at best, a wild
misrepresentation of the USA constitution.
Whom do they think they can fool?
TM, ®, Copyright © 2007 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (july 2007)
The Democratic Congress.
Ask anybody in the street what the Democratic Congress has achieved since
it was elected in 2006, and nobody will know what to answer, not even the
ones who voted for the Democratic Party.
The lobbies still rule Washington. The Democratic Party bent to the National
Rifle Association and did not pass any gun-control measure.
Then it hastily approved a $286 billion package of subsidies for farmers
(Nancy Pelosi spent her political career criticizing farming subsidies
only to sign on to the largest such subsidy the first time she had the power
to block it).
There has been no immigration bill and no energy bill. Illegal immigrants will
keep coming by the millions. And oil companies will keep making money while
the USA becomes more and more dependent on foreign oil.
Ironically, the Democratic Party has not even acted on "global warming",
except for promoting ethanol as an alternative to gasoline (too bad that
ethanol is not any friendlier to the environment) and for proposing
subsidies to the most polluting of all industries (coal).
The reason that the USA is so dependent on oil is that the government helps
(even subsidizes) the oil economy. The Democratic Party has done nothing
to change that. Therefore nothing has changed.
The only area in which one can feel the impact of the Democratic Party is
drugs. There seems to be a lot less determination to fight drugs.
The Democratic Party is even openly condeming Alvaro Uribe, the Colombian
president who, more than anyone else, has risked his life to fight the
drug cartels. He enjoys a much higher approval rating than the USA Congress
(more than 70% versus less than 20%). Nonetheless, the USA Congress feels
that it is its duty to criticize Uribe (as opposed to asking Uribe for advice
on how to run a country).
The Democratic Party has announced that it will boycott a free-trade agreement
with Colombia because of Uribe's human-rights record. The very same party
was very much in favor of ratifying a similar treaty with mainland China,
that Amnesty International considers one of the worst offenders of human
rights in the entire world.
The Congress ruled by the Democratic Party is on its way to be as corrupt,
inefficient and incompetent as its Republican-led predecessor. The USA
desperately needs a third party.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2007 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (july 2007)
Withdrawing from Iraq: why the polls are wrong.
The polls consistently show a majority of USA citizens wants to withdraw
USA troops from Iraq. Polls among the House of Representatives and the
Senate show a majority of politicians wants to do the same.
In other words, the "no" are more numerous than the "yes".
What the polls do not show is how divided the "no" front is.
It is misleading to claim that the majority wants the USA to withdraw from
Iraq, because the truth is that there are countless theories of what this
means in practice. It's like asking someone if they want fish for dinner.
Their "no" does not mean that they don't want to eat dinner. It simply means
that they don't want fish.
To start with, there is no agreement on the fundamental question whether the
USA should care of nor for that part of the world. Given that the USA is
the main consumer in the world of oil, and that nothing seems to upset USA
consumers more than an increase in gasoline prices, should the USA stay in the
Middle East at least to protect the oil? There are some who say "no" but fail
to explain what happens in the next few months, when presumably oil prices
skyrocket causing a worldwide economic crisis. There are many who say "yes"
but most of them can't quite reconcile that "yes" with the "no" to staying in
Iraq.
Then there is the humanitarian question. Should the USA intervene when
genocide is about to happen? Was Clinton right to ignore the massacre of
900,000 Rwandans? Are we right today in protecting the people of Darfur
from genocide? Which one is the right strategy: let people slaughter each
other or use the USA's military power to prevent the genocide? Needless to
say, the chances that Shiites and Sunnis and countless factions will ruthlessly
attack each other will greatly increase once a) USA troops are no longer
there to police the hot spots and b) USA troops are no longer there to
(alas) function as the main magnet for "insurgents". Then they can really
turn against each other with all the weapons they have.
Then there is the question of government. Should the USA influence the outcome?
Do we care if Iraq ends up being a puppet state of Iran? Do we care if it
ends up becoming an Islamic state like the one created by the Taliban in
Afghanistan? Do we care if another Saddam Hussein seizes power?
If the USA abandons the democratically-elected governmentis to its destiny,
very few optimists believe that it will survive.
How can the USA prevent a collapse of the government? What should the USA
do to prevent the rise of a new dictatorship?
Then there are the neighbors. If the USA withdraws, foreign interference is
likely to increase. Iran will help the pro-Iranian religious Shiite groups.
Saudi Arabia and Syria will presumably help the Sunnis survive.
Israel will be extremely nervous about any new Saddam Hussein seizing power
and directing the people's anger towards Israel (a classic Arab trick to
create consensus whenever consensus is missing).
Should the USA let this game take place? Should the USA try and influence
the outcome? If yes, how?
The answers to these questions vary wildly among the "no" front. They are
opposed to the war but, just like George W Bush, they are clueless about how
to manage the aftermath of their actions. Bush couldn't answer the question:
"After you invade Iraq, then what?" The anti-war camp cannot answer the
question: "After you withdraw the troops, then what?"
In a sense, they are no better than the Bush administration. The biggest problem
with the Bush administration has never been the objectives (removing dictators,
especially Saddam Hussein, is a good deed) but the state of denial in which
they operated for too long. They kept denying the problems until it was too
late to solve them. The anti-war front suffers from the same disease: denial.
They keep living in denial of the problems that would arise once the USA
withdraws.
The effect of this new kind of denial is likely to be as bad, if not worse,
than the previous one.
The polls should offer more than a yes/no answer when they ask "should the USA
withdraw from Iraq?" They should ask to flag one:
withdraw all troops now, withdraw all troops over a number of years, withdraw
most troops but maintain some, withdraw troops but deploy them in neighboring
countries, keep troops in this or that province, send troops in again if X or Y happens, etc etc, and, finally, don't withdraw the troops until Iraq is stabilized. The truth is that the opposition is so confused and divided that Bush
might still win this poll.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2007 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (july 2007)
The Supreme Court vs the will of the people.
Poll after poll shows that the majority of USA citizens favors abortion
(62% according to a 2007 Gallup poll).
Poll after poll shows that the majority of USA citizens favors stem-cell research (61%).
Poll after poll shows that the majority of USA citizens favors stricter gun
control (60%).
Poll after poll shows that the majority of USA citizens favors the separation
of church and state.
In other words, the silent majority of the USA is not all that different
from the majority of other western countries where exactly those measures
have been enacted in the past.
Surprisingly, though, the USA lags behind most western countries on all
these fronts.
The reason is to be found in an archaic system that gives the president the
power to appoint justices to the Supreme Court and that gives the Supreme
Court what amounts to veto power. The current Supreme Court was largely
created by George W Bush and leans disproportionately to the right (given
that Bush won both elections with the scantest of margins, and actually
lost the popular vote in the first one, and given that Congress has now
switched to a Democratic majority). In a few weeks that Supreme Court has
de facto reopened the debate on abortion, has overturned a key element of
campaign-finance law designed to limit the influence of lobbies (so that the
National Rifle Association will be entitled to help elect pro-gun candidates),
has cracked down on a student who insulted Jesus (something that the West
thought was a prerogative of Islamic fundamentalists).
In other words, the Supreme Court made of right-wing justices appointed by
George W Bush has consistently ruled against the will of the people.
Isn't that how revolutions start?
TM, ®, Copyright © 2007 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (july 2007)
George W Bush, banana dictator.
Most people didn't even know who Scooter Libby was until George W Bush pardoned him. Now that George W Bush pardoned him, Scooter Libby is famous: he is
a man who was convicted by a court for some crimes that he committed (and does
not even deny committing) but then pardoned by the president in person.
Needless to say, there are thousands of people convicted and jailed whom
the president never even dreamed of pardoning. In general, if you are convicted,
you go to jail.
George W Bush thinks that this rule should apply, except when he feels that it
should not apply.
This shows three aspects of his administration, that, alone, would grant an
impeachment process.
First, the pervasive cronysm of his administration. Bush literally appointed
family friends to important posts, sidelining any concern for competence and
fairness. Gonzales was the ultimate example of Bush's cronysm: an incompetent,
biased and unfair attorney who now runs the justice system of the USA, despite
being loathed by both right and left politicians, and trusted by nobody in the
entire country.
Second, the contempt of his administration for the democratic process. These are
presidents, vicepresidents, ministers and assorted officials who get offended
if someone reminds them that the people have rights. They are annoyed by the
"checks and balances" of the USA constitution. In fact, they are plainly annoyed
by the USA constitution. They ignore both the will of the people and the will
of the democratically-elected parliament. No surprise that they should also
ignore the will of a court.
Third, the power of the vicepresident, Dick Cheney, one of the most sinister
figures in recent USA politics. Most USA citizens would rather have Al Capone
as vicepresident than Dick Cheney. In another (more democratic) country this
man would probably be in jail or banned from the country. In the USA, this
man sits in a Washington office and tells the president what to do.
Books will be written to explain how this terrifying figure (one of the few
people in the world who can really be called "terrorists" in that they inspire
terror in the masses) came to exercise so much power. There is a widespread
belief that much is unknown of what went on behind the curtains from the very
first day that an idiot called George W Bush (mostly known for running
a baseball team, for doing drugs and for executing more people than Saudi
Arabia) decided to run for president of the USA.
Critics who compared Bush to Hitler paid him a compliment.
Day after day, Bush has come to
resemble Robert Mugabe, the pathetic semi-dictator of Zimbabwe: completely
isolated around the world, despised at home, entangled in an endless struggle
against a growing number of domestic enemies, de facto powerless,
but surrounded by a group of cronies that are willing to use all means in
order to maintain at least the vestige of power.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2007 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (june 2007)
The terrorists rule the USA.
It wasn't even reported by the media, but the terrorists scored another victory
in the USA. The "gun lobby", mostly run by the National Rifle Asspciation (NRA),
managed to push through Congress new measures aimed at protecting criminals and
arming them. The new measures deny police the right to request information
about guns used to commit crimes. They also explicitly threaten police officers
with incarceration if they try to get such information. The law is so vague
that it basically intimidates police officers against pursuing any armed
gangster, no matter what: if you try to catch a killer, be aware that you
may end up in jail. It clearly sounds like the NRA wants to make sure that
every murderer in the country is entitled to carry his gun, use it and
protected from police officers to try stop him or catch him.
Basically, all police investigations on gun trafficking and the likes will
come to an immediate stop. Corrupt gun dealers (the NRA's favorite customers)
can celebrate: they will be able to sell guns to just about anybody who has
the money to pay for them.
Thousands of USA citizens will die as a consequence of this provision,
enacted with the votes of Republicans and Democrats alike.
Osama bin Laden is an amateur compared with the NRA.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2007 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (june 2007)
The end of an era
The Pew Center has published its annual Global Attitudes poll.
It shows that the USA is by far the most disliked power in the world, that
foreign countries (even Western countries) trust even Vladimir Putin as a leader
better than George W Bush, that the image of the USA keeps deteriorating around
the world.
The vast majority of USA politicians, philosophers and historians
are convinced that the whole world aims for
USA-style democracy. They fail to read the statistics that consistently show
a global dislike for USA-style democracy. No wonder that groups such as Al Qaeda
and Hamas
can easily enroll so many fighters: Al Qaeda and Hamas promise people
precisely what
they want, while the USA is trying to force on them what they don't want
(democracy).
The world has changed, and the USA just doesn't get it.
The USA is rapidly becoming as unpopular as Hitler's Germany was in 1939
with its obsession to export its political system.
When the choice was between the Soviet Union and the USA, the USA was the
most popular country in the world, and its political system was indeed
what most people wanted. Now that most people have it, they begin to see
the details and they don't like what they see.
The USA is blamed for just about every evil in the world, from tsunamis to
wars, from terrorism to global warming.
When Muslims had to choose between communism and capitalism, they preferred
capitalism. But now that communism is not an option anymore, they can say
that they don't really like capitalism either.
When Europeans had to choose between communism and capitalism, they preferred
capitalism. But now that communism is not an option anymore, they can say
that they like capitalism only with a number of caveats.
Latin Americans never liked the USA anyway. Some of their dictators did.
But this only made the USA even less popular. Poll after poll has shown
that dictators like Fidel Castro and demagogues like Hugo Chavez are more
popular in Latin America than the current or even the previous USA president.
Therefore the end of the Cold War has changed the equation, enabling people
to choose from a broader portfolio of political systems, not just between
two. Now that the competition has increased, the USA political system appeals
to precious few people. Most people perceive it as evil and corrupt.
The USA should take notice of the spots where the USA is still very popular:
sub-Saharan Africa, India, the Far East, Eastern Europe.
Why invest in the Middle East, Western Europe and (worse of them all) Latin
America, if these places hate the USA? What for? The more the USA has invested,
the more hatred it has generated.
Even Egypt and Jordan have a more favorable view of the USA than Argentina.
Their feelings towards the USA are not just feelings against the current
president: they have been around for decades and reflect deeply seated
prejudices against the USA. In Argentina's case, it is sheer jealousy that
the USA achieved what Argentina could have achieved (they were both equally
rich at the beginning but, alas, Argentina was run by Argentinians).
The problems of the Middle East, Western Europe and Latin America have been
largely created by those people themselves. The USA is a convenient scapegoat.
Turkey has the worst opinion of the USA of them all.
In Turkey's case it is the USA's
support for the Kurds and Armenia: as these former victims of Turkish
imperialism and ethnic cleansing are unlikely to be reconciled any time soon
with Turkey, especially if Turkey refuses to admit past wrongdoing,
The USA needs to choose once and forever which side it is on.
Did the Armenian holocaust happen or not? Do the Kurds deserve a homeland
like the Palestinians or not? If the Turkish public opinion answers "no" to
both, then maybe it is good news that the USA is disliked in Turkey.
The USA needs to readdress its commitment to countries that do not like the
USA's policies.
By rewarding the "enemy" within (Western Europe, Latin America and the Middle
East) and neglecting the real friends (sub-Saharan Africa, India, the Far East,
Eastern Europe), the USA may be committing suicide.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2007 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (june 2007)
The solution or the problem?
There is only one entity in the USA that is less popular than president Bush:
Congress. The USA public is clearly not amused by the inefficiency and
corruption that have become a chronic disease in Washington. This is a Congress
that has not addressed any of the pressing problems of the USA: guns
(that kill way more USA citizens than Al Qaeda ever dreamed of), health care
(still elusive in the USA despite being provided for free to most citizens of
the other Western countries), and, last but not least, immigration.
How ironic then that leading candidates of both the Democratic and Republican
parties are members of Congress, from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama to John
McCain.
If, on election day, the USA people remember who they *don't* trust with
government, whichever party fields a governor or former mayor or businessman
may have a huge advantage over the one that fields a member of Congress.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2007 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (june 2007)
Who is the real radical on abortion?
Most of the developed democratic world has accepted that abortion should be
legalize and that the woman should decide. The USA has the largest opposition
in the developed democratic world to this idea. The "pro-life" vs "pro-choice"
debate is largely a USA debate, as anywhere else the "pro-choice" faction
wins overwhelmingly.
However, it is only in the USA that the issue has become so identified with
a specific party. Pro-life (anti-abortion) is a Republican bastion.
Democrats often view the Republican Party as a party of fanatics because some
in the Republic Party are pro-life. What the same Democrats fail to see is
that the real fanatics are the Democrats: there isn't a single major Democratic
leader who is pro-life. The "pro-choice" stand has become a dogma of the
Democratic Party. Whether this is a good or bad thing is besides the issue.
But it is a fact that it is the Democratic Party, not the Republican one, that
enforces just one view of the debate.
It would probably help Democrats win a few million votes if they granted
the opposition at least the right to speak out. After all, the people who
oppose abortion do so based on the belief (whether correct or not) that
abortion kills a human life. It doesn't sound like such an abominable principle.
The dogmatic approach on abortion by the Democratic Party is all the more
surprising if one compares attitudes towards gun ownership and the death
penalty. Those are truly abominable habits, abhorred by the whole civilized
world. Nonetheless, leading Democratic politicians are willing to concede the
right to own guns (and thereby massacre thousands of USA citizens) and the
legitimacy of the death penalty (thereby associating the USA with totalitarian
regimes such as mainland China's and Saudi Arabia's). These leaders of the
Democratic parties seem to think that free abortion is far more important
than gun control or abolishing the death penalty. An odd position, to say the
least, from the point of view of life: it sounds like Democrats stand for
killing, in all its forms.
If the Democratic Party wants to be perceived as a defender of life, wouldn't
it make more sense to abolish the death penalty (like most of the democratic
world has done), outlaw guns (like most of the world, whether democratic or not,
has done) and try to minimize the need for abortion?
TM, ®, Copyright © 2007 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (may 2007)
Newt Gingrich vs Al Gore.
While an incredible number of mediocre candidates debate in may 2007 what
they would do in january 2009 if elected president, two serious candidates
are staying out of the fray and probably enjoying the spectacle.
Newt Gingrich is the only Republican who has a consistent story about
Iraq: he approved of the invasion, but disapproved (in june 2003) of the
way it was being handled. He is the one politician who project the image
of someone who could win that war.
Al Gore is also very consistent, although on the other side of the barricade:
he opposed the war as a bad idea from the very beginning.
Both can claim to have predicted the disaster that followed. And both
have the experience and reputation to boast that they can find a solution,
albeit in opposite directions (militarily in Gingrich's case, diplomatically
in Gore's case).
Compared with Gore, Hillary Clinton is a diligent amateur who, after voting
in favor of the war, may be able to tap into her husband's experience to
explain why she is now against it and what she would do to end it (but not
win it), and Barack Obama is mostly a clueless inexperienced defeatist.
Compared with Gingrich, Giuliani is a provincial major who can, at best,
offer ideas on how to police the streets of Baghdad, and McCain is a
charming old veteran who can, at best, cheer up the troops.
Both Gore and Gingrich, for opposite reasons, are more likely to
galvanize and, more importantly, convince their base.
If Iraq becomes the central issue of this presidential campaign (i.e., if
Bush's new plan fails to stop the civil war), these are the two men who
can obliterate the competition.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2007 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (may 2007)
Oddities of the USA view of terrorism.
The report on worldwide terrorism
prepared by the State Department of the USA highlighted a simple fact:
terrorism is on the rise in the two countries where the USA is increasing
its military presence: Iraq and Afghanistan. Terrorist attacks in Iraq increased
91%, and in Afghanistan 53%. Terrorist attacks in the rest of the world
have actually decreased.
One can draw different conclusions from this simple fact. The most superficial
conclusion is that USA soldiers deployed abroad cause terrorism. This is
certainly true to some extent: the presence of USA soldiers on Islamic lands
(or, better, lands currently occupied by Muslims) is a powerful excuse to
rally radical Muslims and recruit even moderate Muslims.
A less obvious conclusion is that there is a war going on between Islam and
the rest of the world (declared by Islam, not by the rest of the world)
and we all live in denial (trying to distinguish "moderate" Muslims from
"radical" Muslims, and trying to find excuses for every Muslim who becomes
a terrorist, and trying to blame everyone else, from Russia to India to
Israel to the USA, for what is simply the mission of Islam, i.e. spread Islam
throughout the world).
In between these two extreme viewpoints, there is a world of anti-USA
media, led by Al Jazeera, that have capitalized on both extreme viewpoint,
depicting the USA as bent on a new crusade and Islam as a nationalistic
issue. THere is no question that the USA has played into the hands of
Al Jazeera by invading Iraq. There is no question that Al Jazeera has outsmarted
the USA by turning that invasion into an excuse for terrorism against
non-Muslims or even fellow Muslims.
What is happening now is that Al Jazeera is basically lecturing all the Muslims
in the world about the international jihad. Thanks to media such as Al Jazeera,
insurgents in Afghanistan are learning from insurgents in Iraq.
It is just a matter of
time before others (in Algeria, Somalia, Lebanon and so forth) will start
copying whatever strategy works.
The USA report is odd in that it downplays the importance that the media have
in propagating terrorism around the Islamic world.
It is unlikely that the Taliban would be employing the (deadly) tactic that
they are employing in Afghanistan if they had not seen how successful it is in
Iraq.
Another oddity of the report is that it lists five countries as the main
sponsors of terrorism: Iran, Syria, North Korea, Sudan and Cuba.
This sounds more like the list of countries that show disrespect for George
W Bush than a credible list of state sponsors of terrorism. No Cuban has
ever been even remotely associated with Al Qaeda (whereas an anti-Cuban
terrorist, Luis Posada Carriles, who killed scores of civilians,
is being protected by the USA). Ditto for North Korea: has anyone explained
to the CIA that communist countries are atheistic, i.e. even worse than
Christian countries from the viewpoint of Islamic fundamentalists?
What next: Venezuela?
On the other hand the report failed to include India, which is guilty of
not stopping the flow of arms to the Sri Lankan terrorists, and does not include
RUssia, which is guilty, if nothing else, of arming most of the terrorists
in the world (the Kalashnikov is the preferred weapon of both Taliban and
Iraqi insurgents), and does not include Colombia, whose government is widely
believed to be associated with right-wing death squads, and, most importantly,
does not include the whole West, which is the main consumer of the drugs that
fund terrorist groups all over the world.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2007 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (april 2007)
The first debate among candidates to president of the Democratic Party
had two protagonists and one loser. The two protagonists were Hilary Clinton
and Joe Biden. They both proved to be competent. Clinton also proved that
she would be a tough "man", a key factor to appease all those who believe
that a woman cannot be trusted with presiding over the world's superpower.
In a sense, Barack Obama lost the duel with Clinton on both fronts: he seemed
to be both less competent and less determined. During a crisis, one would
rather trust Hilary Clinton than Barack Obama with immediate and effective
action. However, Obama is probably paying the price he didn't pay earlier
for his inexperience.
Dennis Kucinich gave a lesson to everybody on what "honesty" means. One may
or may not like his ideas, but at least he does what he means and means what
he does. Besides, it is likely that the majority of USA voters actually
agrees with this views (who doesn't want Dick Cheney impeached outside of
the Fox News "fair and balanced" commentators?)
Kucinich is likely to become the Nader of the future, and a good candidate
to eventually start the third party that the USA desperately needs to get
rid of the totalitarian regime created by the two main parties.
Ralph Nader has a successor.
The only disappointment (and a major one) came from the man who was supposed
to be the most competent of the candidates: Bill Richardson. It turns out
he is the one who defends the largest terrorist organization in the world,
the National Rifle Association, responsible for the killing of thousands
of USA citizens every year. He, de facto, stood up to defend the right to kill
at will. Is this the new face of Washington that the Democratic Party is
trying to project? The same old lobbies mandating self-serving laws on
the same old unscrupulous politicians?
John Edwards was not a disappointment because he had long lost his credibility
as a champion of the poor. A wealthy attorney who spends a fortune in
hairdressers, he keeps repeating that his father was poor for the simple
reason that he has nothing else to show as evidence of his dedication to the
poor.
Clinton and Obama are the most respectable Democratic candidates because they were not
ashamed of admitting that they never owned a gun in their life, a crime
for which the National Rifle Association and Al Qaeda will certainly
persecute them. If you are a patriot, vote for Clinton or Obama.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2007 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (april 2007)
The Innocence Project.
The Innocence Project is a non-profit organization founded in 1992 by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld at the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University to help exonerate innocents who have been wrongly convicted of a crime they did not commit. The organization uses DNA to succeed where a popular jury failed.
In april 2007 the Innocence Project celebrated the 200th person to be exonerated by DNA testing.
Many of these 200 people had served more than 20 years in prison. On average
they had served 12 years. Fourteen of them were
on death row (awaiting execution for a crime that they did not commit).
If one does a simple proportion (DNA-exonerated cased divided by total number of cases examined by Innocence Project), one infers that the USA has probably executed at least a few hundred innocents in the past, and that at least 30,000 innocents are in jail right now.
This means that at least one every 10,000 USA citizen is sent to jail for a crime that
s/he did not commit (if one considers only the adult population, that
percentage almost doubles).
If these numbers sound staggering, remember that these are "only" the numbers of people who could be exonerated by DNA testing. It does not mean that everybody else in jail is guilty. In most cases the DNA is not helpful to establish if a person was or was not guilty of a crime. There might be thousands of innocents in jail whose innocence cannot be proven by DNA testing.
The USA relies on "popular juries" to administer justice. This means that, once
accused by a prosecutor (who may or may not know what s/he is doing, as
countless cases have proven), your destiny will be decided by a dozen people
chosen more or less randomly from the population. These are the same people
who are routinely fooled by marketing campaigns, not to mention political
campaigns. You will be judged by someone whom you yourself wouldn't trust
for any kind of advice.
If you can afford to spend a fortune in attorneys, you are likely to prove
your innocence (whether you are innocent or not), for the same reason that
these jurors are victims of marketing campaigns.
If you cannot afford to spend a fortune in attorneys, you may end up being the
Innocence Project's next case.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2007 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (april 2007)
The USA releases an international terrorist.
In 1976 a bomb blew up a Cuban airplane and killed 73 people.
At the time Luis Posada Carriles was a CIA operative based in Venezuela.
Investigations led to two suitcases that were checked in by men working for him.
Cuba requested his extradition but that never happened. However,
Posada was arrested by Venezuela (then run by a pro-USA government),
tried and convicted. The evidence overwhelmingly proved his involvement in
the bombing of that civilian plane.
But he managed to escape in 1985. He moved to El Salvador where he helped
USA colonel Oliver North run a terrorist organization to fight the communist
government in Nicaragua. After that venture was successfully completed, Posada
returned to his original aim of overthrowing Fidel Castro.
Posada is suspected of involvement in the 1997 bombings of several
tourist hotels in Cuba and of a plot to assassinate Cuba's dictator Fidel
Castro. He was again arrested in Panama but then pardoned
by Panama's president (a strong USA ally).
He finally entered the USA illegally and was arrested for illegal immigration.
Cuba again requested his extradition. The USA has responded by releasing
the terrorist on bail.
Needless to say, both Cuba and Venezuela (now run by anti-USA crusader Hugo Chavez) have accused the USA of a double standard: pretending to fight a war against
terror when in fact protecting a convicted terrorist.
The whole of Latin America (and the whole world) is likely to draw the
exact same conclusion. As George W Bush once famously said: "you are either
with us or against us".
If this is the way that the Bush administration wants to compete in popularity
with Hugo Chavez throughout Latin America, we already know who is going to win.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2007 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (april 2007)
The largest terrorist organization in the world kills 32 people in the USA.
Every few months i publish the very same article. Because the very same
episode happens again: thanks to the easy availability of guns in the USA,
and thanks to a culture of violence,
someone goes on a rampage and kills a lot of innocents at random.
(See Baghdad, USA;
The real terrorists strike again in the USA;
Tom Delay, anti-American terrorist;
The largest terrorist organization in the world strikes again;
etc).
The culture of violence is created by a society that emphasizes physical
activity over mental activity (kids want to become sport champions, not
win Nobel prizes) and by a society that still administers the death penalty.
But it would be difficult to kill a crowd using just knives and hammers.
What makes it terribly easy is the laws that protect the people who
manufacture, the people who sell and the people who buy guns. There are more
guns in the USA than in any other country of the world. No wonder that there
are also so many murders. Corrupt politicians (especially but not only in the
Republican Party) routinely pass laws that protect serial killers,
handing them even
more guns and even more deadly ones. Tom DeLay once pledged to do everything he
could to make semi-automatic guns legal (in other words, to maximize the
number of people that a murderer can kill in a minute).
The National Rifle Organization has enough money to bribe enough politicians
to effectively produce a mass campaign of arming all USA citizens.
As the New York Times wrote on April 26: "The National Rifle Association and the gun lobby have silenced every legislature in this country. Instead of stricter laws, tighter controls and better background checks, the gun lobby proposes more guns. And what the gun lobby proposes, lawmakers deliver."
The result? Virginia is second in the nation for ease of owning a gun.
It does not take Albert Einstein to figure out why this carnage happened in
Virginia. It is surprising it did not happen earlier.
USA citizens own 240 million guns, i.e. almost one per person.
No other democracy has that demented percentage of guns.
In most western countries the percentage is less than 1 in 100.
About 30,000 USA citizens are the victims of guns every year.
Not surprisingly, no other democracy has that demented percentage of
gun fatalities.
A gun kept at home is 22 times more likely to kill a friend or family member
than an intruder, as proven by a study of the "New England Journal of Medicine",
and USA citizens do not fail to do so: 1,000 people die very year in "gun
accidents". On average eight children are killed "by accident" by guns every
day, the equivalent of a school massacre.
George W Bush said: "The best way to protect our citizens from guns is to prosecute those who commit crimes with guns.". Go tell the parents of these 31 people who died at the Virginia Tech campus, that the best way to protect their lives
is to prosecute the gunman (who is dead anyway).
Dear idiot: the only way to protect those 31 people would have been to
make sure that noone owned guns in the first place, except for the police.
Amend the Constitution so that we can finally live in a peaceful society,
not in the Wild West, and so that parents can send children to school knowing
that their children will come back home alive. Is it too much to ask?
This will never end. Tomorrow it will be a shopping mall. Or a gas station.
Or a post office. Or a restaurant. Or an amusement park.
And what next, Wayne LaPierre?
The National Rifle Organization is the largest terrorist organization in the
world. It keeps the country under a constant atmosphere of terror. We are
terrorized to go to work, to go to school, to go shopping.
Its actions help to kill more USA citizens than Al Qaeda and the Iraqi insurgents combined.
What are we waiting for? That they kill us all?
Imagine the irony in the case of the Romanian-born professor, a holocaust
survivor, who survived the folly of Hitler but did not survive the folly of the NRA.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2007 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (april 2007)
The USA, former superpower.
The gross national product of the European Union has passed the gross national
product of the USA. China's GDP will pass the USA's in 2027, according to
USA projections. Germany alone has already passed the USA as the world's main
exporter and China is about to pass the USA in second place.
The largest car manufacturer in the world is now Japanese (Toyota) and the
largest company in the world is Saudi (Aramco).
Asians are now the biggest consumers of luxury goods.
The dollar is one of the weakest currencies in the world.
The USA is still the leader is several sectors. It is the world's biggest
consumer of drugs (marijuana, cocaine, heroin, you name it). It executes more
prisoners than any democracy in the world. It has the largest prison population
in the world. It has the highest number of serial killers and mass shootings ever recorded in history.
It has the largest trade deficit (i.e. debt) ever recorded in
history. It is the most polluting country in the world. It consumes more energy
(and in particular oil) than any country in the world.
It won't be easy for the USA to retain its status of superpower.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2007 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (april 2007)
Corruption at the World Bank.
After winning his second term, president George W Bush openly challenged his
critics and nominated his two most controversial advisors, John Bolton and
Paul Wolfowitz, to two prestigious international positions: respectively,
ambassador to the United Nations and president of the World Bank. The rest of
the world, said Bush, will just have to live with his decisions.
Bolton's tenure at the United Nations was marred by so much controversy that
he had to resign one year later.
Wolfowitz was sent to the World Bank to deal with an organization that,
according to George W Bush, was wasting money and mismanaged.
In april 2007 it surfaced that Wolfowitz was dating an employee of the World
Bank, Shaha Riza, and that he had magaged to get a promotion for this
girlfriend. The promotion came with a comfortable new salary: $200,000,
and tax-free (technically speaking, she's a diplomat).
Wolfowitz is now under pressure to resign. A statement released by his staff
reads: "his conduct has compromised the integrity and effectiveness of the World Bank Group and has destroyed the staff's trust in his leadership."
In the meantime Shaha Riza is enjoying her $200,000 salary while thousands
of honest USA workers are making not even one third of this amount
(and have to pay taxes on their salary). Another lesson to be learned for
the youth of the USA: sleep with a powerful man and you'll get rich and
powerful (the former lesson was that if you do drugs in college and
drink & drive, then you become president of the USA).
(The fact that the United Nations is demanding the resignation of Wolfowitz
over a $60,000 raise but did not ask for the resignation of Kofi Annan as
secretary general over the $12 billion oil-for-food scandal, that starved the
Iraqi peoople and supported Saddam Hussein, is telling about the dirty politics
of the United Nations, but that's another story).
This follows by a few weeks a scandal involving Bush's personal friend
Alberto Gonzales, whom Bush appointed Attorney General against an unusually
strong opposition by the Democratic Party. Gonzales was not qualified for the
job and held very partisan views, but Bush guaranteed that the man was a model
of fair and balanced judgement. So much so that Gonzales fired several
prosecutors for not conforming to the ideology of the White House, and pressured
others to issue sentences that investigations have proven worthless.
(A Georgia Thompson spent a year in jail for a crime that was never committed, accused of it by a Gonzales crony, Steven Biskupic, at a time when the Republicans needed to smear the Democratic candidate.
In Arizona the US attorney, Paul Charlton, was discouraged from pursuing the investigation of the Republican candidate for Congress, Rick Renzi, who was suspected of corruption; and in fact Renzi was elected and now sits in Congress,
while Charlton has been fired. Get it?)
Gonzales made a mockery of the USA judicial system, that now looks very
similar to the patronage system that ruled under Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
This followed the repeated allegations that Dick Cheney and Karl Rove
masterminded the act of treason committed against CIA agent Valerie Plame
Wilson in retaliation for her husband's political views, a demented conspiracy
worthy of a Hollywood movie.
This followed the resignation of Tom DeLay, Bush's strongest ally in Congress,
who was found guilty of all sorts of "unethical' actions.
Is there anyone in the Bush administration who is not corrupt?
Is George W Bush simply an idiot in the hands of cunning crooks, or is he
in person the greatest crook who ever became president of the USA?
TM, ®, Copyright © 2007 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (april 2007)
An open letter to Nancy Pelosi.
You have consistently argued in favor of withdrawing as soon as possible
from Iraq and letting the Iraqis solved their problems by themselves.
Whatever you are going to call this, the entire world (both friends and
enemies and indifferent observers) will call it "surrender". The USA will
be viewed as having lost the war.
I have three questions for Nancy Pelosi:
1. Can the USA afford to lose yet another war? The USA is largely seen worldwide
has having won virtually no war in its history, except against very small
countries such as Panama. The USA entered Word War I at the very end, when
the Germans were already on the brink of defeat. The USA certainly helped
close the conflict earlier, but can hardly claim to have "won" that war since
they did not fight most of it. In World War II there is no question that the
British and the Soviet Union were the real winners against Germany. The USA
did win the war against Japan but USA's history books neglect what the rest of
the world knows: that China lost a lot more people in the fight against Japan,
and so did the British. Then the USA lost in North Korea, in Vietnam, in
Lebanon, in Somalia. In all of these places the USA had to withdraw and allowed
the enemy (China, Vietcongs, Syria, Al Qaeda) to install friendly governments.
The world perceives the USA has having lost all these military confrontations.
These repeated defeats have greatly damaged the international prestige of the
USA and increased the defiance of anti-USA regimes (from Al Qaeda to Iran
to Venezuela).
Can the USA afford to lose yet another one?
(In a tape released in may 2007, Osama bin Laden's deputy Al-Zawahri said that Al Qaeda is "nearing closer to victory over the enemy", i.e. the USA: he was referring to you).
2. Do you really think that the Iraqis will solve their problems by themselves?
Don't you think that, the moment the USA withdraws from the scene, the
neighboring countries (to say the least) will greatly increase their
influence over the various fighting factions?
Don't you think that in history the vacuum left by a vanishing power has always
(always) been filled by other powers? Can you name a case in history in which
a power abandoned a sphere of influence and no other power took over?
Don't you think that, by calling for the Iraqis to solve their problems by
themselves, you are de facto asking for the neighboring powers to increase their
meddling into Iraq's affairs?
3. Do you care at all for the will of the Iraqis themselves? The democratically elected government of Iraq has repeatedly opposed any plan for a timetable for the withdrawal of USA troops. Do you care at all for what will happen to millionsof Iraqis under your plan? If not, why should they or anyone else care for the
USA? Isn't this precisely what fuels anti-USA terrorism, the indifference of
the USA for the lives of others?
P.S. Can you also explain why your party's bill for the withdrawal of the
troops from Iraq includes $74 million to help peanut farmers store their crops
and $25 million for California spinach producers?
TM, ®, Copyright © 2007 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (april 2007)
Pelosi vs Bush, Syria vs Israel, the USA vs the Arab people.
Nancy Pelosi has should not be proud of legitimizing the Syrian dictatorship
by visiting the president of Syria amid great fanfare.
But her visit underscores two different ideological views of the Middle East,
that the entire West (not just the USA leadership) is struggling with.
One view is that
Hamas and Hezbollah are terrorist groups because in the past they supported
and encouraged suicide bombings targeting civilians (Bush would define them as
terrorists simply on the ground that they kidnap Israeli soldiers, but
every army in the world does that).
The opposite view (obviously held by the vast majority of the Islamic public
opinion and probably by a majority of the European public opinion) is that
Hamas is both a legitimate political party (that won the most recent elections
in the Palestinian Territories) and a legitimate movement of freedom-fighters,
and that Hezbollah is a legitimate Lebanese political party equipped with
"bodyguards" just like any party in Lebanon.
It is hard to believe that these views cannot be mediated and differences
resolved. Both Hamas and Hezbollah do represent the will of millions of people.
So it is pointless to call them "terrorists". Some of their members indeed
were and probably still are. But the movements as a whole represent millions
of people, including many peaceful Arabs who are simply interested in schools
and jobs (and possibly freedom, if it's not asking too much of the Western
powers).
The way to make sure that the "moderate" arm of these movements prevails over
the "military" arm is not to isolate them and insult them and reverse the
results of fair democratic eletions. The way to help the "moderates" is to
educate the Arab people that there are better ways to create a viable and
prosperous society than to send your children to blow themselves up in a
market or a bus station. For example, it is popular in the Arab world to say
that the Palestinians only have their bodies to fight with. When i am in the
Middle East, i always reply that the Jews, persecuted for many centuries
by the Christians, only had their "minds" to fight with:
they became scientists, economists, writers and philosophers, not suicide
bombers. The Arabs produced a lot of terrorists, but very few scientists,
economist, writers or philosophers.
Who is doing better today, the Jews or the Arabs?
This argument works wonders.
If the West emphasiszed this kind of arguments (instead of simply criminalizing
the Arab mind), the popular tide would turn against the suicide bombers.
TOday precious few Hamas and Hezbollah members want their children to win a
Nobel Prize in Physics. At best, they want their children to emigrate to the
West (and sending the best minds overseas does not help the Arab societies
but helps the Western ones). At worst, they want their children to continue
the endless fight against Israel and the whole West.
Therefore Nancy Pelosi's visit to Syria may be the beginning of a reassessment
of Western strategies towards these two very popular Arab movements.
One thing should be clear by now to even the dumbest USA president:
you cannot win the hearts and minds of the Muslims by simply declaring that
their heroes are evil people. You paint yourself in a corner, and, indirectly,
you end up boosting the very dictators (such as Syria's) that you want to
weaken.
The USA should recognize both Hezbollah and Hamas as representating millions
of people in their countries. And, in parallel, the USA should try to change
the cultural psychology of these lands, where too many parents and priests
and teachers are still convinced that martyrs go to paradise, no matter what.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2007 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (april 2007)
The difference between Iraq and Syria.
Two distinguished USA politicians traveled to the Middle East and visited a
local market. One was John McCain, desperate to prove that the situation in
Iraq is improving, and walked into a Baghdad market.
He was wearing a bullet-proof vest and was surrounded by USA soldiers
holding machine guns to defend McCain from the many snipers, militia men and
suicide bombers. The other one was Nancy Pelosi, on a semi-private mission
to Syria, who walked into a market of Damascus. She was wearing a headscarf
instead of a bullet-proof vest, and was escorted by Syrian police officers,
who protected her from a crowd of cheering shop-owners who were offering her their goods.
Pelosi was warmly welcomed by the Syrian people, while McCain hardly made any
contact with a cold and distant Iraqi people.
No metaphors could better explain the mood in the Middle East. Iraq is a
democracy whose dictator has been deposed and executed. Syria is a dictatorship
whose dictator is still in power. Not only are the Syrians doing a lot better
than the Iraqis, but they also seem to like the USA a lot better.
If the invasion of Iraq was meant to conquer the hearts and minds of the Arab
world, it has obviously failed miserably. On the other hand, if Bush's verbal
attacks against Syria were meant to create hostility between the two countries,
it has instead boosted the popularity of the USA opposition in the Arab world.
Assad, probably one of the architects of the mess in Iraq and in Lebanon, has
consistently outsmarted Bush.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2007 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (march 2007)
Al Gore's global warming.
Al Gore's global warming is not real. It is mostly in his head.
Al Gore has redefined himself as a champion of what he considers the main
problem facing the Earth today: global warming. He testified in front of the
Congress and his testimony is exemplary of the distortions that fanatics use
to prove a theory that is not scientifically sound.
He said that the planet's temperature has increased by one degree Fahrenheit
(the USA is the only country that does not use centigrades, otherwise he would
have said "centigrade", which is actually a lot more). It turns out that such
fluctuations have been going on for centuries. In fact, the planet "has" been
mostly warming up, otherwise our race would not exist: human civilization
emerged after the end of the Ice Age. You don't have to be a rocket scientist
to figure out that the planet has been warming up between the Ice Age and now
(luckily for the human race).
Even assuming that the rise in temperature becomes a constant for many decades,
Gore does not explain what is wrong with the warming of the planet.
He mentions that the oceans would rise by almost seven meters. With all due
respect, the worst estimate from climatologists is about 7 cm.
Regardless of whether you believe the apocalyptic prophecies,
most of the world would probably go along with the theory that we have to
cut carbon-dioxide emissions (because it's unlikely that they do any good
to our atmosphere).
He calls for a cut in emission of carbon dioxide. But he does not mention
the easy solution to the problem, that would also solve a lot of other
problems, from Islamic terrorism to the crises with Iran and Venezuela:
abandon oil in favor of nuclear power. Nuclear power does not produce
carbon dioxide. What he asks us to do, instead, is basically go back to the
stone age. Most of the planet would rather wait for the oceans to rise 7 cm.
(See also The US reneges Kyoto: idiot or savant?).
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (march 2007)
Another war that the USA is losing.
The "war on drugs" was declared by president Bush I, who promised to eradicate
the problem from the American continent. His failure is as bad as his son's
failure in Iraq. Not only drugs have become even more widespread (Americans who
have never done drugs tend to blush), not only his own son admitted of having
used drugs before becoming president, but the business of drug trafficking
has never been so profitable. Even better: as long as you are white, the
chances of ending up in jail are almost zero. The number of people serving
time in jail for drug offences is indeed very high, but they are almost all
black and Latino (more than 70%). Statistics say that the vast majority of drugs
are actually consumed by white middle-class people of all ages and genders,
but those who end up in jail are overwhelmingly poor blacks and poor Latinos.
Police routinely arrest people in poor neighborhood when they find them with
drugs, but virtually no police officer in his own mind would check if white
middle-class people are doing drugs at one of their respectable parties.
Thus the "war on drugs" becomes an even bigger joke.
It would be comedy if it weren't tragedy: those white middle-class folks who
support the drug trade are funding terrorism in places such as Afghanistan and
Colombia.
All the USA does to stem the plague is put in jail poor blacks and Latinos
who are selling drugs to rich white people because that's what the demand is.
If white yuppies demanded bananas, these kids would be selling them bananas.
If white yuppies and their children demand pot and cocaine, the poor kids
sell them pot and cocaine.
The drug traffickers are simply an effect, not the cause.
If you really have to punish someone, start punishing the people who
cause the problem. The USA society would probably greatly benefit from getting
rid of a few million of dumb white yuppies and their children.
An idea: send them to more civilized places such as Singapore that have the
death penalty for drug offenses.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (march 2007)
The enemy within: crime.
While there has been no terrorist attack since 2001, the USA has witnessed
a dramatic increase in all kinds of violence.
(Report on crime increase in the USA)
This trend is hardly surprising if one lives in the USA. It is self-evident
that good manners are rapidly becoming a thing of the past and violent behavior
is pervasive.
The Clinton era witnessed a considerable drop in violent crime around the country, so one wonders what did Bush "undo" that caused the current rise in crime rates?
Bush is only partially responsible. He is certainly responsible for a simultaneous
reduction in both social programs and police force, which, of course, is a recipe for disaster. As more and more youths are thrown into the streets with nothing
else to do, fewer and fewer police officers are there to watch over them.
Bush's tax cut for the rich caused a big problem for everybody else: his tax
cuts included a cut in both social programs and police funding.
But Bush's budget deficit is only part of the problem. It would be unfair
for the USA society to blame only the economic factor. Truth is that there are
way too many broken families, that "raise" way too many dysfunctional
children. This is a problem that started in the 1960s and is only getting worse
with every new decade. A majority of USA citizens (not including recent
immigrants) do not know how it feels to have just one mother and one father
who have always been together. Thus they cannot appreciate the argument.
In fact, they are bound to repeat their parents' mistakes in the belief that
what happened to their childhood is ok. What happened in their childhood is
the foundation of many social problems.
Next, of course, is the mother of all problems: guns. The USA has more guns
than any other country in the world, including Iraq. No surprise therefore
that so many USA citizens gets murdered every year, almost as many as the
number of Iraqis killed last year in the civil war (30,000). There is a de facto
civil war in the USA, one waged by the "gun lobby" (the National Rifle
Association and the corrupt politicians that work for it in Washington)
against the people of the USA. This kind of teerrorism is far more effective
than Al Qaeda's terrorism in killing USA citizens.
Last but not least, the USA is pervaded by a culture that rewards violence,
from rap music to videogames. If you kill, you become a star. If you kill,
you win the game. The death penalty is part of this culture: if it is ok
for the government and the state to kill, why isn't it ok also for a private
citizen to kill?
At the same time that the (Police Executive Research Forum published its report on crime another statistic was
published, that showed the USA leading the world in number of people behind bars (prisons and jails). The USA has the highest number of prisoners in the world and the highest number of executions in the democratic world, but crime keeps increasing. They just don't get it.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (march 2007)
Condi's quiet diplomacy.
There was a time when Bush would scream "you are with us or against us" and
proclaim the "axis of evil" and proceed to invade and destroy in the name of God.
Six years later a largely anti-USA mood pervades the world, even where friends
outnumber enemies. As a popular sticker goes, "we are creating enemies faster
than we can kill them".
NOt all was wrong. In fact, most of Bush's foreign policy moves were long
overdue and it is sad that it took a terrorist attack to wake up the USA to
the need to remove the Taliban and Saddam Hussein from power.
The USA also sided with countless underdogs, from Georgia to Liberia, helping
democratic worldwide.
However, the Bush administration learned the hard way why humans invented
diplomacy: because whether you are right or wrong matters a lot less than
the way you are right or wrong. Stepping over everybody's toes is not a good
way to make friends, regardless of whether your argument is valid or not.
As much as everybody hates it, the truth is that there is a practical reason
why diplomacy exists.
Enters Condoleezza Rice. Since she became the foreign minister of the USA,
the attitude has changed quite dramatically. The ideology is the same, and
Rice wastes no opportunity to reminds her international audiences of her
crusader's belief in exporting democracy. But the means she employs are
clearly different. It is also surprising how effective her quiet diplomacy
has been,
It is emblematic how the USA dealt with Somalia. Not a single USA soldier
was employed. Not a single minute was wasted in trying to phrase a
United Nations resolution that would please France and Russia. Not a single
threat was launched on the air waves. The USA basically subcontracted the
case of Somalia to two trusted allies: Ethiopia and Uganda. It was Ethiopia
that invaded Somalia and expelled the Islamists. It was Uganda that volunteer
to patrol Somalia and maintain order. They can both be more ruthless than the
USA, without the scrutiny of western media and the persecution of Al Jazeera.
North Korea suddenly agreed to get rid of nuclear weapons, after resisting
and provoking for a decade.
(Note of july 2007: North Korea eventually gave in and agreed to shut down
a disputed nuclear reactor).
The USA has also managed to keep their Arab allies in line while letting
Israel massacre Hezbollah militias and assorted Palestinian insurgents.
In fact, the Arabs even resurrected an old peace plan with Israel, at the
very time when Israel has done precious little to ingratiate itself with
the Arab masses.
Progress has been made in isolating Venezuala in South America.
Uruguay threatened to leave Mercosur rather than abandon plans for a treaty
with the USA. And Brazil signed a major deal with the USA while Venezuela's
president Chavez was contesting Bush in a parallel event. Brazil may have not
necessarily showed support for Bush, but it certainly ridiculed Chavez's
anti-Bush campaign by doing precisely what Chavez did not want them to do.
Chavez looks more like the one left behind than the one leading the troops.
Only Argentina, the bastion of anti-USA sentiment, supports Chavez (Argentina and the USA were the emergenging powers one century ago, but one went on to become the world's superpower while the other one became of th eworld's greatest failures).
The USA is also being successful in isolating Iran and Syria within the
Islamic world. For a while it looked like the rhetoric of Iran's president
Ahmadinejad would conquer the hearts and souls of the Islamic world that the
USA had so badly lost, but it now looks like Ahmadinejad has lost support
within his own country and the Arab masses, reminiscent of so many demagogues
who promised triumph and only brought defeat, got tired of his empty
tirades.
(Note of july 2007: Iran eventually gave in and agreed to United Nations inspections).
The Palestinian factions manage to form a government of coalition, one that
falls far short of Israel's demand for recognitiion but one that represents
a step forward (and away from civil war).
The democratically-elected Lebanese government has survived all attempts by
Hezbollah to change the rules of democracy, and is receiving massive amounts
of money for reconstruction.
After a weekend visit by John Negroponte (who works for Rice), in april 2007 Sudan agreed to let the United Nations deliver aid to the Darfur refugees, thus stopping an escalation that was leading to military confrontation.
Even the European Union looks more pro-USA than it was in 2003, especially
should Sarkozy win the elections in France (following Merkel's victory in
Germany).
The USA may not win the war in Iraq, but it has won a number of difficult
diplomatic wars, proving that, when it wants, it can outdo Europe even at
what Europe is (or was) best: diplomacy.
In a July article in Business Week, Rice said: "If I look back, though, what I'm most glad we did is to put the promotion of democracy at the center of American foreign policy. I'm a firm believer that unless America stands for the fact that every man, woman, and child deserves to live in a system that permits them a say in who governs them, that permits them to educate their boys and girls, to be free from the knock of the secret police at night_unless we stand for those very basic human rights, no one will. But in the Middle East, we had a policy of exceptionalism. We somehow argued that stability was what mattered. And I know when you look at the Middle East today, you say: "Whoa, it's not very stable." Well, it wasn't very stable before, either. It was a false stability in which dictators like Saddam Hussein put 300,000 people in mass graves, where Syria occupied Lebanon for decades, where healthy political forces were squeezed out because authoritarian regimes gave them no place to develop. Instead, al Qaeda become the expression of politics in the Middle East."
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (January 2007)
Where the USA is winning
There is no question that the Bush administration has so far failed badly to
turn Iraq into a viable democracy after liberating it from the brutal dictatorship of Saddam Hussein.
(See How to win in Iraq).
At the same time, one has to recognize that the USA is winning in several other
places of the world, that are not as advertised precisely because the USA is
winning and not losing.
To start with, the USA seems to be prevailing over the insurgents in
Afghanistan. For a while the Taliban had staged a comeback and seemed intent
in copying the bloody tactics of their Iraqi brothers. It looks like the USA
has reestablished control over several regions and greatly diminished the
threat coming from the Taliban that take shelter across the border in Pakistan.
This may also be due to the fact that Pakistan has quietly increased its
cooperation with the USA and Afghanistan, a fact which in itself counts as
a positive achievement.
Another front where the USA is doing better is North Korea. In 2006 the initiative
was taken by North Korea and the USA was clearly on the defensive
(See North Korea and the new Far-Eastern order). But it looks like Kim Jong Il's decision to test a nuclear bomb
(and the rather unimpressive size of that test) has backfired against the
regime itself. China got really upset over it and did what it had previously
been reluctant to do: put real pressure on Kim Jong Il's regime to stop its
nuclear program.
Relationships with China in general seem to have improved dramatically. China
has helped broker a deal with North Korea. China has become more accomodating
with Japan. And China has stopped threatening Taiwan with invasion every other
month.
However, the real success story of early 2007 (if it lasts) has to be Somalia. Somalia had
fallen into the hands of Islamists in a way that was eerily reminiscent of
what happened a decade earlier in Afghanistan. The USA successfully striked a
deal with Ethiopia and let Ethiopia clean up the mess in Somalia. An
internationally-recognized government was reinstalled in Somalia by Ethiopian
troops. Once the Islamist troops had been dislodged from the highly-populated
area of the capital, the USA then finished the job by using high-technology
arms to destroy the army of the retreating Islamists.
The combined effort of Ethiopian ground troops and USA high-tech weaponry
may be an important new element in USA military thinking. One wonders if an
Sunni Arab army backed by USA weapons wouldn't be more effective at bringing
stability to the Sunni triangle and the western region of Iraq than the
current combination of weak Iraqi troops and sparse USA soldiers.
So far the USA has also been successful in keeping a democratic government
in power in Lebanon. The USA has not acted in Lebanon, but it has used its
regional allies to stem Syria's influence on Hezbollah and to prop up
the democratic regime. So far it seems to have worked while avoiding a new civil
war.
Last but not least, the USA seems to have succeeded in isolating the regime
of Iran. Iran's president is much less outspoken than he used to be. He has
lost a domestic election to more moderate clerics, and (more importantly)
he has lost the support of just about every country in the world except Syria.
Russia and China are now joining the USA and the European Union in striking
Iran with sanctions. While those sanctions are largely symbolic, they send
a message that Iran did not want to hear: that more may be coming if Iran
does not change attitude. Worse: the price of oil is retreating, which
greatly reduces Iran's financial leverage over oil-hungry countries.
Generally speaking, the USA has been successful in creating around the world
a new level of cooperation against Islamic fundamentalists.
Whether Bush likes to admit it or not, the USA has recognized that Islam
"is" the problem. Whenever an Islamic movement (whether Sunni or Shiite) gets
armed, terrorism and civil war ensue.
(One can argue forever why this happens. See Not Islamic fascism but Islamic denial).
The USA has created awareness around the world that Islamic movements must
be prevented from creating their own militiae. Believe in Allah and Mohammed if
you wish, but do not match that belief with bullets. This message is
reverberating around the world.
While much still has to be done to disarm Islamic fundamentalists in Pakistan,
there has been progress in Indonesia, the Philippines, Central Asia, Africa,
and Russia itself. The most significant help has come from the very countries
that used to support Islamic fundamentalists: the Arab countries. Militiae
such as Hezbollah and Hamas are not finding donors the way they used to
twenty years ago.
Thus there are many achievements that the USA can mildly be proud of.
Unfortunately the failure to establish a Palestinian state and the failure
to establish an Iraqi state are so visible and dangerous that everything else
pales in comparison.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
Back to the world news | Top of this page
- (January 2007)
The collapsing dollar.
Since its peak, the dollar has already declined by 35% against the euro
and broadly against every currency you can name. The main reason of this steady
decline is the huge USA current-account deficit (the largest in the history
of the world), which is mainly due to the trade deficit (the largest in the
history of the world), which is mainly due to the huge wave of imports from
all over the world. The USA imports cheap goods from "developing" countries
(countries such as South Korea and Taiwan which are now often more developed
than many of the states of the USA) and imports high-tech goods from former
developing countries (Japan) and former European "colonies" (Germany). And of
course it imports oil from the oil-producing nations.
The result is that the USA owes the rest of the world a few trillion dollars.
The trade deficit now stands at about 900 billion dollars a year. Every year,
on average, the debt of each American citizen towards the rest of the world
increases by about $4,000. This makes the USA currency (the dollar) weaker.
The dollar will get even weaker as two forces start working in cahoots.
On one hand, USA investors themselves will keep shifting towards foreign
investments in order to maximize their return (foreign stock markets are
booming too and a USA investor gains money just by having non-dollar
investments). On the other hand, governments that have ammassed huge fortunes
in dollars (such as mainland China) will keep shifting their
foreign-exchange reserves towards non-dollar currencies, precisely to
minimize the losses due to the decline of the dollar. These two trends
will combine to push foreign currencies up and therefore the dollar futher down.
Since there is little that is likely to change the dependence of the USA
economy on foreign materials and goods, this situation is likely to continue
for at least a generation. It is difficult to see what could reverse the trend.
If the USA introduced protectionist measures to stem the flow of imports,
USA consumers would have to pay a lot more for their clothes and electronics,
which would make them a lot poorer. Furthermore the huge corporations (such as
Walmart) that got rich by selling cheap goods to USA consumers would
risk their profits. Thus it is unlikely that politicians will do anything
to stop USA consumers from purchasing foreign goods. And there is little
that the USA can do to stop purchasing oil from oil-producing nations.
Another reason that the USA government has little interest in stopping the
decline of the dollar is that, ultimately, it helps. USA corporations are
seeing higher profits because the gains from their international operations
are denominated in foreign currencies that are appreciating. If you sell
the same amount of goods in Europe, you may be making 38% more than ten
years ago just because the euro is worth 38% more. Second, the cheap dollar
does help exports, that are in fact booming (even though not enough to
significantly correct the trade deficit). This also brings profits in.
This all contributes to economic growth and to the boom of the stock market.
So far foreigners also seem to be willing to invest much of their dollar wealth
into the USA itself, thus bringing back most of the dollars that the USA
spends in imports, thus further fueling economic growth and the stock market.
Who is paying for the collapsing dollar? Ultimately, the average USA citizen,
who is now 38% poorer than corresponding European citizens. However, USA
citizens tend to travel little abroad and know little about the rest of the
world. Thus they will realize how poor they have become only the day they are in Rome
and have to pay $2 for a can of soda, or the day they are in Tokyo and
have to pay $20 for a pizza. But this will probably happen only once or twice
in their lifetime.
More worrying for the future of the USA is that a weak dollar may deter
many world brains from moving to the USA and encourage many USA brains to
move elsewhere in the world. The USA became a superpower also (mainly?) because
it was able to attract an amazing number of brains from all over the world.
Those brains account for many (most?) of the USA inventions and USA companies.
If the brain drain ends, or, worse, starts flowing in the opposite direction,
the USA is likely to lose whatever competitive advantage is left with.
Thus the decline of the dollar may spell a bigger kind of trouble for the USA:
a decline of its entire civilization.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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