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- (september 2016)
Let Silicon Valley stop North Korea.
North Korea's fifth nuclear test came just days after the
highly-choreographed G20 meeting hosted by China.
The West has long perceived North Korea as an "irrational" actor on the international scene, but, in retrospective North Korea's actions seem very rational
In 2002 Bush coined to expression "axis of evil" to describe the totalitarian regimes of Iraq, Iran and North Korea. In 2003 Bush launched an invasion of
Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein from power.
Two years later North Korea announced that it had developed nuclear weapons,
and in 2006 it carried out its first nuclear test. By becoming a nuclear
state, North Korea got its life insurance: the USA cannot attack North
Korea because North Korea would retaliate against South Korea, easily killing
the 20 million South Koreans who live near the border (e.g. the whole of Seoul).
North Korea did not stop there. They realized that they could achieve much more
than safety if they managed to build long-range missiles capable of carrying
a nuclear weapon across the Pacific Ocean. When they achieve that feat, they
will be able to negotiate with the USA from a completely different position.
The fifth nuclear test, coming right after the G20 meeting, was a signal sent
to those 20 nations that one nuclear power is still excluded from the G20 group:
North Korea wants a sit at that table.
There is nothing irrational with North Korea's strategy. In fact, it is as
rational as it gets in international politics.
On the other hand, the actions of the USA seem highly irrational.
The USA did not stop North Korea from developing nuclear weapons, and that
was a very irrational decision. In the 1990s Russia was much weaker and China
was still not strong enough: Bill Clinton could have hit North Korea's military
installations with little or no international repercussions. In the 2000s
George W Bush was so obsessed with destroying the regime of Saddam Hussein
(who posed virtually no direct threat to the USA) that he ignored the one
member of the "axis of evil" that was developing nuclear weapons.
In the 2010s Barack Obama was so reluctant to get involved into international
trouble that he de facto reassured North Korea of no retaliation of its
continuing progress in nuclear and missile technology.
The USA has been the irrational player. North Korea has been and is very
rational.
Now the USA has to wake up to a new world order, one in which a tiny and poor
country like North Korea will soon have the means to blackmail the USA.
In a few years North Korea will be able to strike California with nuclear
weapons. Many will probably move out of California, starting an exodus back
towards the eastern states after two centuries of western migrations.
The value of properties in California will collapse. Silicon Valley (that now
harbors three of ten largest companies in the world by market capitalization)
will evaporate as businesses move to safer regions.
North Korea's first missile capable of striking California will have a bigger
effect on the USA than the two World Wars and the Cold War combined.
California cannot hope that the inept presidents sitting in Washington, and
entangled in complicated diplomatic dances with China, South Korea and Japan,
will find a way to stop North Korea. California has Silicon Valley, and Silicon
Valley has plenty of visionaries who are investing their billions of dollars
in the most futuristic enterprises. The solution to the North Korean problem
should come from them. They are the ones whose status quo will be threatened
by North Korea and they are the ones who have the means, the speed and the
vision to achieve the impossible. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are working on
space technology. Mark Zuckerberg is donating 99% of his wealth to technological
causes. Elon Musk is also launching an institute for Artificial Intelligence,
Open AI. Many local philanthropists are helping out. If these people decided
to disarm North Korea,they would probably be more successful than
Washington diplomats. They have the technology, the brains and the money to
find a way to stop North Korea. Like nobody else on this planet.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2016 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (july 2016)
Civil War: the real weapons of mass destruction.
The USA is rapidly descending into the civil war that i had predicted in
The end of the USA .
As predicted, the sheer number of guns deployed by the largest terrorist
organization in the world (the National Rifle Association)
is causing people to start shooting at each other.
Not surprisingly, the civil war started in Texas, a state run by the NRA
in which people are legally armed to their teeth and allowed to carry guns
all the time. Tourists should be warned to wear bulletproof vests when they
travel to the USA. Citizens should consider safer countries.
The trigger (sorry for the pun) of the Dallas shootings (in which 5 police
officers were killed) were the killings
of two black men in Minnesota and Louisiana by white police officers,
two killings caused by guns: in countries where people don't have guns the
police officers don't shoot so easily.
If you are a police officer in a country where people are armed to their teeth,
of course you shoot to kill at the slightest sign of danger: your priority is
to go home alive. It is easy to criticize the cops for using excessive force:
the excessive force lies in the fact that US citizens own (and often carry)
200 million guns. It is not only cops who kill innocents: a lot of armed
US citizens kill their family members, their friends, their neighbors and
passers-by because they are surrounded by armed people.
It is the principle of the Rwandan genocide: if you don't kill, you may be killed.
In december two Muslims, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, killed
14 people in San Bernardino using weapons that they bought legally.
In june another Muslim, Omar Mateen, killed 49 people at a gay club in Florida, again using weapons that he had bought legally.
Almost everybody in the USA understood that these were Muslims but
a lot of US citizens seemed to miss the most shocking part of these two
events: they had bought their weapons in regular stores.
The people who provide weapons to terrorists in Syria and Iraq are regularly
bombed by coalition forces. Anyone in the world who sells guns to the Syrian
or Iraqi terrorists is sent to jail.
On the other hand, in the USA anyone can sell weapons that will be used by
"terrorists" to carry out mass shootings.
In other countries "Islamic terrorism" means car bombs and suicide bombers:
in the USA it means people who buy guns in a store.
You cannot make it any easier.
Islamic terrorists have killed fewer than 100 people in the USA since 2001.
On the other hand, during the same period, more than 200,000 people have been
murdered for reasons unrelated to terrorism.
The radical right-wing media and politicians focus their audience on those
100 victims to distract people from the other 199,900 victims.
Obviously, it is not "radical Islam" (the favorite expression used by radical
right-wing media and politicians) that
kills. It is guns. Guns kill, period. Guns don't care what your reasons are.
Guns are designed to kill. They kill because that's what they are designed
to do, just like washing machines wash clothes and cars transport passengers.
An incredible number of killings are even more tragic: they are "accidental"
killings, not even triggered by a real cause. Millions of US citizens are
arming
themselves without having a proper training nor the psychological capacity
to handle guns.
They have zero chances to defend themselves from an attacker,
but a very high chance of accidentally killing a family member, a friend,
a neighbor, a passer-by.
Today's weapons are way too deadly, even for specialists; they are weapons
of mass destruction.
let alone for the general public. You need to take classes in order to drive
a car, and you will be rejected if you have the slightest mental or physical
problem, but, thanks to the NRA, in the USA anyone can walk into a store and
buy a gun: is it easier to kill 100 people with a car or with a gun?
The civil war started in 2016 not because ISIS of the "Black Lives Matter" movement decided to attack the USA but simply because over the past four years 37 states out of 50 bent to pressure from the NRA terrorists and passed legislation that makes it easier to buy and carry a gun. The number of mass shootings has tripled during the same four years.
Donald Trump wants to ban Muslims from entering the USA, but Islamic countries
are actually safer than the USA: just compare the murder statistics of the USA
with Indonesia or Morocco. The USA is even catching up rapidly with Iraq,
Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan. In a few years the USA will pass
Afghanistan, whose murder rate is 6.5 and declining versus the USA's 3.9 (World Bank data).
Turkey is considered a dangerous place because of a series of terrorist
attacks from ISIS, but its murder rate is still under 3.
The USA still fails to understand that the NRA is no less murderous than ISIS.
As long as the USA fails to classify the NRA as a terrorist organization
(and deal with its leaders and supporters the same way it deals with ISIS leaders and supporters),
the killings will keep increasing.
Meanwhile, the places where guns are virtually non-existent have murder rates
under 1: Germany 0.9, China 0.8, Japan 0.3.
Unfortunately, these countries don't really welcome US immigrants, just like
Donald Trump doesn't welcome Muslims and Hispanics.
See also The end of the USA
Reply to letters from readers after a man killed 84 people with a truck in France:
You can certainly kill a lot of people with a car, but only during a parade.
You can kill a lot of people with a semiautomatic gun any day in any mall,
amusement park, casino, rock concert, night club, school,...
I'll let you research how many people have deliberately been killed by cars
over the last 20 years and how many people have deliberately been killed
by guns over the last 20 years.
Yes, i wrote "killed by guns". It is the gun that kills, not the killer,
just like it is the hammer that drives the nail into the hole not me.
I would never be able to nail these two wooden boards together.
The hammer does it, not me.
That said, if one wants to kill of course he will probably kill. But a lot
of murders in the USA are carried out by people who did not intend to kill
when they left their home.
They killed because they had a gun. Had they had a knife or no weapon at all,
most likely it would have ended with a fistfight or simply run away.
piero from the garage
P.S.:
France has 600 murders a year (murder rate 1), so these recent terrorist
attacks will significantly increase the murder rate in France (to maybe 1.5).
Nonetheless, lo and behold, even so France remains a much safer country
than the USA, where 12,000 people get murdered every year (and this does not
include all the "gun accidents" that kill family members, friends, etc)
Divide by the population (USA = 300 million, France = 60 m) and you
get that the USA is 3 times more deadly than France in the middle of
these 2016 terrorist attacks.
Even if terrorists kill ten times more people in France,
you will still be more likely to get killed in the USA
than in the streets of Paris.
US tourists who cancel their vacations in Paris should read their
own city's statistics.
We don't call it "terrorism" simply because we have a weird definition
of terrorism: if he's inspired/armed by ISIS, then it's terrorism; if he's
inspired/armed by the NRA, then it's not terrorism.
For anybody who lives in a southern state, these numbers should be terrifying:
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/homicide.htm
It seems pretty obvious that the states with the highest murder rate are
all in the south and the ones with the lowest murder rate are all in the
north, with the exception of California.
When Fox News (Fix News?) talks of Chicago as the murder capital of the USA or of
San Francisco as a sanctuary city, they literally don't know what they
are talking about.
Among the big states of the USA, only Massachusetts (murder rate 1.6)
is almost as safe as France is in the middle of these terrorist attacks.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2016 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (june 2016)
Pardon the heroes.
There is one international hero that the USA still considers a criminal because the criminal government of
Barack Obama didn't like that this hero exposed one of the great abuses of power of the 21st century.
Some of us cannot think of a greater living hero than Edward Snowden.
In 2013 this humble employee of the NSA revealed details of a vast government operation to spy on citizens and on foreign leaders, including some of the US closest allies. Instead of being rewarded with a gold medal, he had to flee the
country and is still living in Russia, where he was granted political asylum.
It is simply embarrassing that one of the great defenders of individual freedom of our times is not a Russian
dissident in exile in the USA but a US dissident in exile in Russia.
Snowden's actions still reverberate in both the political and the high-tech world. We live in the Snowden age.
We continuously debate the rights of government to spy on its citizens. We debate the right of corporations to
track out behavior. These discussions are vital to define the words "democracy" and "republic" in the 21st century.
Snowden has been more influential than any philosopher of the last 50 years.
Books, conferences and, why not, government studies discuss the relationship between privacy and technology.
Snowden was assailed like a traitor by the radical right-wing politicians and media, but a right-wing Congress has instead
passed laws requiring a overhaul of the NSA. A court has ruled that the actions of the NSA were illegal, but no
official of the NSA has ended up in jail or in exile: why is Snowden a criminal for reporting a crime while the
people who committed the crime are not considered criminals?
Other governments of the "free world" had to admit that they did the same to their citizens.
And no terrorist organization or foreign enemy has benefited from Snowden's actions.
We are all a lot safer than we were before 2013. The world is freer than it was. Technology is healthier.
Lo and behold, the NSA can carry out more surveillance (not less) when needed without any need to break the law.
Meanwhile, Bradley/Chelsea Manning has been in jail for six years and will be for 30 more years.
This is a wildly disproportionate
punishment for someone who has, quite simply, told the truth, and therefore helped the public get a little more
control over the government that in theory it elected to represent it. By comparison,
one of the most despicable humans in modern history, Dick Cheney, has never been in jail a single day.
Cheney has done nothing to benefit the public and has done much to harm the public.
Bradley/Chelsea Manning is guilty of providing WikiLeaks a wealth of top-secret information about world politics. That information
was published by distinguished newspapers in the free world and literally rocked the world.
We learned the truth about hundreds of shady political affairs. Simply put,
Manning's revelations have helped the world politicians become more honest.
Manning was widely accused by radical right-wing politicians and media of causing great harm to the USA.
None of their predictions came through: not a single person was killed, and not many US personnel had to be
replaced because of those leaks.
Bradley/Chelsea Manning is in jail because the government is a vast evil bureaucracy that does not exist to serve
the public but to sustain itself. One also suspects that "she" is in jail mainly for having changed sex, something
that many radical right-wing people do not condone even if they would probably condone the "crime" she committed.
Like all departing presidents, Obama is entitled to pardon people who have committed crimes. He should also pardon
two people who have served the public.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2016 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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==========================================
- (june 2016)
Another Aviation Mystery.
In march 2014 a Malaysia Airlines airplane en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing
(flight MH370) carrying 239 people mysteriously disappeared without sending any SOS.
Debris have surfaced on the coasts of southeastern Africa, but to this day nobody has a valid theory of what
could have caused the plane to crash in the ocean. That was a Boeing 777.
No terrorist organization ever claimed responsibility for the attack.
In may 2016 an EgyptAir airplance en route from Paris to Cairo
(flight MS804) has mysteriously disappeared without sending any SOS.
Debris have been found in the Mediterranean.
US presidential candidates Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump rushed to blame
Islamic terrorists (Trump actually shouted it on both tv and radio, ridiculing anybody who would
hesitate to do likewise),
but no terrorist organization has claimed responsibility for the attack, and
satellite imagery shows no sign of an explosion.
This time the plane is an Airbus A320.
The similarities between MH370 and MS804, though, are striking.
Donald Trump, certain that every accident on Earth must have to do with "radical
Islamic terrorists", would probably take the similarity to be
"both flights involved a Muslim crew", but we can add a third recent crash of
a civilian airplane that had a purely Christian crew.
In march 2015 a Germanwings airplane (flight 9525) en route from Barcelona to
Dusseldorf crashed into a mountain in southern France, killing all 150 people on board.
That was an Airbus A320, but the cause has been established beyond any doubt:
co-pilot Andreas Lubitz (not a Muslim at all) decided to commit suicide and took all the passengers
and crew with him.
Further back in time, in
1980 an Italian passenger airplane was downed in mysterious circumstances in the Gulf of Ustica.
The US navy is widely considered a suspect in that accident that killed 81 people.
And we never really heard a convincing explanation of what took down an American Airlines over New York two
months are the 2001 terrorist attacks.
Finally,
there is now quite a bit of certainty that the Malaysian airplane carrying 295 people, mostly Dutch, that crashed in July 2014 in Ukraine was shot down (accidentally) by Russian soldiers (of the Christian religion, presumably). See for example this Timothy Snyder article.
Donald Trump and the mainstream media (Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, etc) have to learn that not all aviation accidents
are caused by Muslims, and that banning Muslims does not save the world from all possible tragedies
(except the tragedy of swelling the US population that believes in gods).
I personally find more shocking the story of a man who kills
149 people because he has decided to end his life than the stories of suicide
bombers who use terror as a weapon in their war against the West.
(Alas, the USA has always used terror as a weapon, from Roosevelt's fire-bombings of Germany and Japan to
Truman's atomic bombs, from Nixon's napalm campaigns in Indochina to George W Bush's "shock and awe"
bombing of Baghdad, so "terrorism" per se is not necessarily "bad" - it depends on why it is done).
But these don't seem to be acts of terrorism and the politicians who were quick to accuse "radical Islam" should
admit that, at the least, they had no facts to back their opinion. Screaming hysterically against Islam is fine
with me (i dislike the ideology, radical or not radical) but doesn't help solve the problem that air travel is
still way too dangerous: your next flight may be shot down by Russia, North Korea or Iran (or the USA),
your next flight might disappear with no reason (and no black box will be found), your next flight might have
a suicidal pilot on board. These things cannot happen to high-speed trains.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2016 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (may 2016)
Democracy's Apocalypse.
Now it is official: Hillary Clinton will be the presidential candidate for the
Democratic Party,
and Donald Trump will be the presidential candidate for the Republican Party
And, no, this is not a late-tv skit.
The USA is interrogating itself about how it ended up having two candidates
for president who are both hated by the majority of the public.
Is it democracy when the choice for voters is between two people whom the
majority of voters do not want as president?
In any civilized country Hillary Clinton would be disqualified from running
for office. She is under investigation, and she has been before.
The "mistakes" she committed while secretary of state would
certainly bar her from employment in the US government, but now she wants
to become the head of that government.
If elected, she would probably set a new world record for head
of state fighting the highest number of scandals. Hillary Clinton makes
Putin, Erdogan and Netanyahu look like amateurs in terms of how
arrogant and hypocritical she can be.
Donald Trump is a little Berlusconi of North America, a congenital liar
who would set another world record: the head of state who filed the highest number
of bankruptcies. And probably also the head of the state who has been divorced
by his wived the most times.
His own party thinks that he should be disqualified from running for president.
Trump has been bribing or bullying his very critics to force them to fall into
line just like mafia bosses in Sicily do. There must be a filmmaker out there
who senses a blockbuster: a man with the IQ of a chimp who sounds like a
cross between Berlusconi and Vito Corleone. Trump must have Italian genes.
If Clinton had a modicum of dignity, she would step aside. Besides not having
a modicum of dignity, the problem is
that she would be replaced by her nemesis Bernie Sanders, a cartoonish
character who seems to come out of a 19th century Dickens novel.
Meanwhile, in november 2015 the approval rating of the US congress/parliament
hit an all-time low, 11%.
Basically, US voters strongly dislike their representatives and strongly
dislike the future president of the USA, regardless of which of the two
evils will be.
How did the US democracy collapse to this all-time low?
A Supreme Court decision that corporations are persons (this is not a joke, it
really happened) has something to
do with it, because it made money even more important than politics.
A failed educational system that has been declining for at least 50 years
has something to do with it: when people know more about UFOs than Relativity,
and a lot more about ancient superstitions than Darwin, you can't expect
them to vote for geniuses.
In 1946 the USA enjoyed the #1 high school graduation rate in the world.
Today it rankes #22 among 27 industrialized nations.
US students rank 25th in math, 17th in science and 14th in reading (OECD, 2012).
Only 46% of students finish college.
When the voters have the highest high-school graduation rate in the world,
they elect someone like Eisenhower. When they rank 22nd in the world, they
end up with Trump the chimp and Clinton the hyena.
These presidential elections are also laying the groundwork for a second
civil war.
Obviously, California and Massachusetts (the two high-tech powerhouses of
the planet) have no intention of living under the rule of a chimp
(Donald Trump).
But, obviously, oil-producing Texas and coal-producing Wyoming (two bastions of the backward economy) have no intention of living under the rule of a hyena
(Hillary Clinton).
Obviously, New York (the world's powerhouse of finance) has no intention of
living under a financial crook like Donald Trump the same way that Nebraska (an agricultural powerhouse) has no intention of living under a sneaky opportunist like Hillary Clinton;
and Illinois (where nuclear power and the mobile phone were invented) has no intention of living under casino businessman Donald Trump the same way that Kansas (that doesn't even believe in Evolution, let alone Climate Change) has no intention of living under attorney Hillary Clinton.
An impressive cast of idiots, crooks, fascists and (political) prostitutes is supporting Donald Trump for president:
New Hampshire's senator Kelly Ayotte,
New Jersey's governor Chris Christie,
former Louisiana's governor Bobby Jindal,
former Texas's governor Rick Perry,
Kentucky's senator Mitch McConnell,
Nevada's governor Brian Sandoval,
Wisconsin's governor Scott Walker,
former rival Ben Carson,
former Alaskan governor Sarah Palin,
former vicepresident Dick Cheney,
radical tv commentator Sean Hannity,
venture capitalist Peter Thiel, etc.
(I forgot Putin, ISIS and the dictator of North Korea).
At the same time, an impressive cast of ... nobody! is supporting Hillary Clinton: we haven't
heard one single enthusiastic endorsement for Hillary Clinton. The most
influential Democrats are technically supporting her, but hardly telling voters
why anyone should vote for her other than to vote against Trump.
Not a word from her husband's vicepresident, from the current vicepresident,
from Nancy Pelosi, from just about any of the Democracts that we can name.
It doesn't help that the two main parties seem to be so out of touch, almost
surrealistically out of touch, with the issues that really matter to the
public.
The Republican Party's platform consists in saying "no" to anything that president
Obama wants to do (even when Obama wants to do something that the Republicans
originally proposed) and the
Democratic Party... well, besides making sure that nobody offends Islam
(offending all other religions is ok), it is currently focusing on transgender bathrooms...
TM, ®, Copyright © 2016 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (january 2016)
What Donald Trump represents.
First of all, Donald Trump is NOT the Republican Party.
The establishment of the Republican Party has been
irritated by Trump's very exisitence as a Republican candidate.
After he proposed a ban on Muslim immigrants, just about every Republican who
matters denounced him as a racist.
The National Review, close to the party, published a rare personal attack against Trump signed by several distinguished conservatives.
Nonetheless, Trump's approval rating keeps going high.
If you add Ted Cruz and Ben Carson, whose language might be more polite but whose views are very similar to
Trump's, more than 50% of Republicans side with candidates whom the Republican
Party does not really welcome.
George W Bush is quoted as having said "I just don't like the guy" when asked about Ted Cruz.
Who would have guessed that in 2015 George W Bush would have sounded like a leftist.
What Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and Ben Carson represent is clearly a further shift
to the right of the Republican base.
What should worry the Republican Party establishment is precisely the nature of
this base.
Check the audience at a Trump event and you will easily realize that
his base mostly consists of older white males.
They don't wave smartphones with the latest Silicon Valley apps.
They wave old-fashioned signs on wooden sticks.
The reason they keep moving to the right of the political spectrum is
that they feel under attack.
These older white males are the ones who suffered most from the Great Recession.
Their status is waning in the age of the Internet.
Most of them have traditional, working-class jobs that have been under attack for decades.
The Great Recession took a devastating toll on them.
They dropped out of college and
they are still convinced that the US economy is collapsing because for them
it never got better.
While they complain about unemployment and stagnating wages,
a December 2015 report found that the average salary for software engineers
in the San Francisco Bay Area was $136,000.
They don't belong to that crowd and have no idea that kids just out of
college can buy expensive apartments.
They don't understand all the talk about "artificial intelligence", "virtual
reality", "nanotech"... These are all mysterious words.
They feel threatened, not empowered, by technology and automation.
Their reaction is to be hostile to science, to defend the Bible against
Darwin, and to treat Quantum Mechanics as mumbo jumbo, certainly less
reliable than a radical Fox News commentator.
They go to church. They stock guns. They rarely travel to other countries,
and they know nothing of Asia's high-speed trains and skyscrapers.
They don't understand climate change science, and view it as a plot by
evil foreign powers like the United Nations.
In other words, the 50% of Republican voters who likes Donald Trump and Ted Cruz
is a species that will soon go extinct; certainly not the future of the country,
and not the future of the planet.
These older uneducated white male from the working class are clueless about
how the global economy works and miss the good old days when "the economy"
was limited to the main street of their town.
During a speech at Liberty University in Virginia, Donald Trump proclaimed:
"We're going to get Apple to build their damn computers and things in this country instead of in other countries"
His supporters cannot understand that this can happen only if 1. the salary
of the US worker gets as low as the salary of a Chinese worker; or 2. the US
consumer is willing to pay 5 times more for that Apply computer; or 3. Apple
replaces all workers with robots; or 4. the USA turns communist and subsidizes
Apple to sell its products at a government-set price (the way most populist
experiments end up in Latin America).
It's a lose-lose proposition for Trump's
very base of older uneducated white working males, but they don't have
the education to understand anything other that the US anthem and the Bible.
These older white males are also nostalgic about an era in which you could speak frankly and loudly about the problems of the country and in which politicians in Congress were actually getting things done.
These days they perceive inaction in Congress, even regarding important and urgent issues, and they feel constrained into silence by increasingly obsessive rules of political correctedness.
These days you can't open your mouth without being accused of being a bigot, sexist or a racist.
Terrorism per se would not be a problem, but the fact that the president refuses to call it "Islamic" terrorism
for fear of offending Muslims is a problem.
Police discrimination against blacks might be real, but these voters
are more irritated by the fact that nobody can blame young black males in public
for being responsible for the vast majority of violent crime in the country.
They are shocked not that the country accepted gay marriage but that it
has become taboo to speak against homosexuality.
These are all things that are obvious to them but that they cannot say aloud
anymore outside of their homes.
It does feel a little bit like a communist country, where the regime can be
criticized only in the privacy of one's home.
(This is a popular brand of toothpaste in China. It is called "Black Man"
and clearly makes fun of black people's white teeth. In the USA this would
be unthinkable:
Hence, Donald Trump, insulting his way to the top the way Mussolini did in 1922,
looks like a breath of fresh air: finally someone who can say what we
always wanted to say but we are told it's politically incorrect to say.
Then there's inaction: Congress has been debating for years about illegal
immigration, and nothing has been done by Congress; the tax code is hated by
everybody, but Congress has not found a way to simplify it;
this new Congress, dominated by Republicans, promised to undo Obama's big programs, but hasn't delivered.
The Republican Party keeps winning elections by promising to undo Obama's
policies that are unpopular with older white males of the working class (a class
that does vote, unlike younger people, college kids and minorities),
but then the Republican Party does little to change Obama's policies.
De facto, it has endorsed most of them even while it was denouncing them
as treason. Trump's fans are uneducated but not stupid: they sense that the
Republican establishment is treating them like idiots, and their reaction is
to endorse the candidate who makes fun of the Republican establishment as
weak and hypocritical.
The Republican drift towards incivility is not a new phenomenon. We live in
the age of Islamic terrorism inspired by Wahabi Islam, that actually shares many
(anti-scientific and pro-religious) traits with the Trump movement,
the age of xenophobic parties who keep winning more and more votes in
all European countries, and the age of Putin, the Russian president
who is immensely popular in his country thanks to a colloquial populism very
similar to Trump's. Trump's inspiration comes from three success stories:
Benito Mussolini, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, and Vladimir Putin.
And also Juan Peron, Fidel Castro, and many other populist
demagogues of Latin America.
The "older white nostalgic Christian male" audience is the audience that turned radical tv network Fox News and radical radio commentator Rush Limbaugh into national
sensations, and this is the audience that those conservative media in turn
created. The likes of Fox News are responsible for the Donald Trump and
Ted Cruz phenomena just like Al Jazeera is responsible for today's Islamic
terrorism. In its zeal to attack the USA and the West in general, Al Jazeera
ended up praising (directly or indirectly) pretty much anybody who stood up
against the West, with the degree of praise being proportional to how staunch
the opposition was.
Al Jazeera created a fictional world in which the USA invaded Iraq to steal
the oil and in which Osama bin Laden either didn't exist or was a nice dude.
Al Jazeera ended up creating a mood of "jihad" that is the very
reason why so many young people all over the world are willing to become
"martyrs". The radical tv network Fox News did the same in the USA. It fueled hostility against the
"liberals" who are supposed to steal the "American dream" and created a
fictitional world of endemic crisis and decline of the USA. Fox News viewers
have no idea that the economic crisis ended in 2012, that unemployment is
falling to record lows, that Silicon Valley rules the world and that the dollar
is again the strongest currency in the world. The average Fox News listener
probably hasn't even realized that gasoline prices are the cheapest in a
decade. Fox News relentlessly attacks
anything that the Democrats do, and praises those Republicans who oppose
the Democrats, with the degree of praise being proportional to how staunch
the opposition was.
Fox News has been hammering Hillary Clinton over the "email scandal" and over
the "Benghazi terrorist attacks". Fox News specializes in creating these
huge "scandals" out of nothing whose common goal is to spread the feeling
that the USA is on the verge of an apocalyptic economic and military collapse.
(Fox News does not mention that Hillary Clinton's Republican predecessors
Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice used the
same practice for their emails, and that there has been a lengthy and costly
inquiry into the Benghazi attacks that killed a handful of US citizens but
no inquiry into the 2001 terrorist attacks that killed 3,000 US citizens).
No wonder that Fox News ended up creating the same
attitude towards "martyrdom" transposed in a democratic system. The Tea Party
is the Al Qaeda and ISIS of Fox News. Donald Trump
and Ted Cruz are the Osama bin Laden and Al Baghdadi of Fox News.
The Republican Party won elections thanks to the cunning propaganda unleashed
by Fox News 24 hours a day, but now it has to deal with the monsters created
by that very propaganda.
As Jason Easley wrote: "Fox News has lost control of zombie army that they created. Donald Trump uses the same strategies as Fox News, but in many ways, he does them better."
Make what you want of it, but this demographic group also happens to
coincide with the group for which life expectancy has been decreasing.
A Princeton Univ study presented at the National Academy of Sciences
in September 2015 ( http://www.pnas.org/content/112/49/15078 ) revealed that
the death rate for white men aged 45 to 54 has risen sharply since 1999,
counter the general, nation-wide and world-wide trend of longer life
expectancy. The causes are varied, but one stands out: suicide.
Candidates of either party have a realistic shot at winning a presidential
election only if they can capture the vote of the independents;
but 50% of Republican voters (the Republicans who are likely to go and cast
a vote) prefer candidates like Trump and Cruz who sound too radical (and
perhaps too ignorant) to appeal to the independents.
What the other 50% of Republicans likes is not clear because none of the other
candidates
(the candidates favored by the Republican establishment and the ones who
are more likely to get the vote of the independents)
has truly found his or her voice. They are too busy defending their record
against Trump's insults. They are too busy trying to match
Trump's and Cruz's populist rhetoric among that angry base of actual voters.
What we can guess is that the other 50% (the moderates) shares an equally
strong albeit rational hostility towards the Democratic Party and its
"liberal" policies.
But who is going to speak out for this 50% if it becomes a minority and
the Republican Party gets dominated by the quasi-racist,
quasi-fascist, warmongering demagogues?
Trump can win the nomination of the Republican Party only if he gets all
of the 50% who are angry and some of the 50% who are moderates; not a
terribly likely scenario (eventually the moderate votes will coalesce around
one moderate candidate instead of being disperse among so many) but certainly
a growing possibility. If he doesn't win the nomination,
Trump is likely to run as an independent, regardless of what he pledged (he
specializes in changing his mind and finding perfectly popular excuses for
doing so).
Whether he gets
the Republican nomination (thereby alienating the independents and mobilizing
the liberals) or runs as an independent
(thereby splitting the conservative ticket), his presence looks increasingly
like a gift
to Hillary Clinton, which explains why she and the Democratic Party
establishment have refrained from attacking him. The Democratic strategists
probably see Trump as the best gift they could get.
Even better: those angry older white males who support Trump and Cruz
have moved so much to the right that they
will not vote for a moderate candidate chosen by the Republican establishment.
The Democrats feel that,
barring a last-minute miracle (like a Mitt Romney resurrection),
this presidential election ended the day Trump entered the fray.
The Republican Party has been happy to win Congressional elections thanks to
the emergence of the Tea Party, but the Tea Party may end up sinking not
the Democratic Party but the Republican Party itself.
This is not because Hillary Clinton is popular.
In fact, this may be the first election in history in which the two
most famous candidates are very unpopular.
Both Trump and Clinton score sky-high negative ratings (number of voters
who have a negative view of them).
That too explains Trump's success: this is an age in which voters are much
better at deciding what they don't like than what they like. The world has
become too complex, and the media have become too noisy, for older
uneducated males to understand it. They are nostalgic of a simpler era,
when you didn't need a master in business administration or computer science
to get a well-paying job.
Donald Trump has a record of going after his critics whenever he has the power.
He is not shy to threaten publicly the people who attack him, even conservatives
like Fox News commentators Megyn Kelly and Glen Beck. He is basically
broadcasting loud and clear the message that, should he be elected, he will
remember who fought against him and will find ways to damage their careers.
And viceversa. That's Mussolini's way, that's Putin's way. It does work.
Some get scared (senator John McCain, whom Trump mocked for being taken
prisoner during the Vietnam war instead of hailing him as a hero) and
others get enticed (like aging radical right-wing celebrity Sarah Palin, who seized
the chance to resurrect her waning career).
In the end, nobody has been able to truly define what Donald Trump represents.
Politicians like him tend to seize power during harsh economic times or
in war time; but
the USA is not in a recession (in fact, unemployment is reaching
an all-time low) nor is it at war (there is no military draft).
It could be that this is a phenomenon that has more to do with the media
than anything else. People resent the media's sensational stories, but at the
same time people are influenced by the media's sensational stories and give
the media what the media uses to create sensational stories.
People dislike that the media creates unworthy celebrities
but then the same people tend to follow the celebrities, who are indeed
mostly unworthy, and thus people make celebrities even more famous.
This is a vicious loop that tends to create a constant sense of dissatisfaction,
anger and even panic.
Perhaps it is not a coincidence that the two leading candidates in this
presidential campaign are both unworthy celebrities (Hillary Clinton and
Donald Trump). Celebrity is created by the media, and the media are funded by
the people; thus the people are getting what they pay for.
It has been noted (by mediaQuant) that Donald Trump spent a mere $10 million in paid advertising but received media attention worth about $2 billion.
A famous magazine made fun of Sarah Palin's endorsement of Donald Trump,
but forgot to mention that both were made famous by the domestic media,
not by some obscure conspiracy or by some evil foreign power.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2016 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (january 2016)
The US politicians terrorizing the world
I started writing this article in China, where my website is banned but
where i can read about the Republican debates.
I just read a summary of the latest Republican debate on foreign policy.
Yesterday i was visiting a big city and a young woman was my escort/guide/interpreter.
I was comparing notes.
On one hand were the smiling, peaceful, friendly, hospitable citizens of this
town, everybody happy to meet the Westerner and ready to help out.
My friend was singing a simple Buddhist litany
while playing with cats and dogs. When asked what she wants from life, she
replied "A quiet park where people from all over the world can meditate,
meet and have fun".
We walked among ordinary families taking a stroll by the lake.
There was a general sense of peace and polite coexistence.
On the other hand were the speeches of those Republican politicians
(Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, etc) who are competing to prove who will
be tougher on foreign policy, i.e. who will drop the most bombs on other
countries.
They all agreed that the USA does not spend enough on weapons, when in fact
the USA already spends a mindboggling amount on arms, more than the next
eight countries combined (those eight countries include China and Russia).
The world seen from China is a different world: The USA has military
based all around China (Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Mongolia, Afghanistan,
Pakistan) and a nuclear treaty with India: imagine if China had military
bases in Cuba, Jamaica, Canada and a nuclear treaty with Mexico...
The Republican candidates seem to compete on the number of foreign civilians
that they are ready to kill:
Iranians, Chinese, Russians, Afghans, and, of course, especially Muslims.
It felt stunning to me that the dictatorship of China has created a
population that aspires to peaceful
coexistence with the rest of the world and politely welcomes the foreigner,
whereas the democracy of the USA
has created 1. a generation of warmongering politicians
with an insatiable appetite for meddling into the affairs of the rest of the world
and 2. a generation of voters who
enthusiastically support their blood-thirsty ideologies.
The leaders of China think that the best credential to become president
is to guarantee peace and prosperity to the Chinese people.
The Republican candidates think that the best credential to
become president is to kill as many foreigners as possible.
I am horrified by how the Republican candidates keep demonizing Iran.
No matter what Iran does, they keep insisting that the USA should terrorize
Iran. Iran is a 4,000-year old country of 80 million people,
most of which happen to like
the USA, but most of which have suffered because of sanctions that were imposed
mostly because of pressures from Iran's enemies, namely the genocidal and racist
state of Israel and the medieval theocratical dictatorship of Saudi
Arabia, both of which happen to be strong supporters of the Republican Party's
military and oil establishments.
I left China just after a new appalling record was
set in the USA: a record number of yearly mass killings. No wonder.
I am not sure what the biggest threat to ordinary families of this planet is:
Islamic terrorists or ordinary Republicans?
TM, ®, Copyright © 2016 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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