- (november 2018)
Why You should Vote for the Democratic Party, even if you don't like it.
I have little, or no confidence whatsoever, in the competence of the
Democratic Party. The USA will miss Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton if the
Democratic Party wins: Obama was an intelligent man who was very careful
about his decisions; Hillary was a competent woman who had a clear vision
of the world and of the economy (unfortunately for her, a woman, hence unlikely to be voted even
by women, let alone by men, even if Fox News hadn't demonized her with all
sorts of conspiracy theories and even if the FBI hadn't conspired against
her just one week before the elections).
The new stars of the Democratic Party are followers of Sanders (reckless
idealists) or of Pelosi (blinded big-government fanatics); or are just
inexperienced dreamers with vague populist plans.
However, there are several important reasons to vote for this party even
at the cost of wrecking the economy (which is still the Obama economy,
regardless of Trump's usual exaggerations).
- Russia. Putin plotted to keep his arch-enemy Hillary Clinton out of the White House and was lucky enough that the Republican Party nominated Donald Trump, possibly the easiest man to manipulate and blackmail in the entire world (see the timeline of the Trump-Russia collusion scandal). Putin basically controls the USA's foreign policy. That's why Trump slaps sanctions on China (see Why Trump Slapped Sanctions on China), that's why Trump attacks Iran (see Why Kill the Iran Deal Now) and that's why Trump humiliates the USA dealing with North Korea's dictator (see Beyond Dementia: how a Young Upstart took advantage of a Senile Moron). That's why Trump doesn't do anything to contain Russia, which has annexed Crimea, which protects Syria's dictator Assad, and which occupies several territories of Georgia and Ukraine, besides throwing opposition politicians into jail, assassinating journalists and poisoning defectors.
More damaging in the long term may be the fact that "Vladimir" Trump is destroying the USA's credibility with allies such as the European Union and Canada, not to mention his scathing critique of NATO as "obsolete". The power of the USA didn't come from winning wars (the USA actually lost most of them: Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and soon Afghanistan). It didn't come from the size of the economy (at one point the Soviet Union almost matched the USA's GDP and the European Union passed it before Brexit). The power of the USA was its alliances: the USA plus Europe plus Japan plus Canada plus Australia etc is indeed a superpower. Trump is de-facto dismantling these alliances, leaving the USA alone in the world (see The New New New World Order); which is, of course, Putin's ultimate triumph.
Putin treats Trump like a governor, the governor of a Russian province called USA (see The Greatest Humiliation in US History?)
- Mitch McConnell. The leader of the senate is rarely held accountable for his actions but he more than anyone else has fostered an anti-democratic movement and created the current polarized atmosphere. He spent six years blocking any Obama legislation, therefore creating gridlock in Congress, which he could then blame on Obama's incompetence. He blocked Obama's nomination of a progressive judge to the Supreme Court until a Republican became president and appointed a conservative judge. His tactics, supported by the radical right-wing propagandists of "Fix News", worked: he won the majority in Congress (despite the fact that the Democratic Party won more votes) and he won the presidency to his party (despite the fact that the Democratic candidate won three million more votes than Trump) and he won a conservative majority in the Supreme Court (despite the fact that every poll shows the public closer to progressive than conservative views). Now he is silent about Trump's mounting scandals because he is more than willing to sell his soul to the devil in return for political gains. He knows that most likely Trump is owned by Putin, but he prefers having a president who takes orders from Putin than having a president of the Democratic Party. He tacitly approves the antidemocratic actions by "red" states to limit voter turnout, and approves the widespread gerrymandering that guarantees Republican victories in many areas; and may in fact turn these actions into federal law. In other words, McConnell, not Trump, is the real aspiring dictator of the USA, intent at designing a political system that will keep his party in power regardless of how many people vote against it. McConnell is a dangerous man, underestimated because we tend to think of the president as the man who rules the country when in fact it is often the senate that does.
- Trump's immorality. He is following in the footsteps of other "illiberal" authoritarian quasi-dictators and openly admires those who stay in power for life while insulting the leaders of the democratic world. He wanted to throw his opponent in jail ("lock her up!") and he attacks the agencies that investigate his treasonous actions (the FBI, NSA and CIA).
He defended Saudi Arabia (a kingdom where all non-Islamic religions are banned) when it killed and dismembered a Washington Post journalist, and it defended Saudi Arabia when it bombed a bus in Yemen killing 51 civilians.
He is engulfed in more scandals than any politician in the history of the USA (see The Trump Scandals) and we all know why he never released his tax returns (see What's in Trump's Tax Returns).
He thrives in incivility and vulgarity. His whole power comes from insulting everybody all the time (notably women) and from the most debasing attitude, otherwise nobody would have paid attention to his sham of a campaign.
He incites hatred and violence. The largest massacre of Jews in US history happened under his watch, carried out by one of his fans.
His culture is the culture of Playboy magazine, gambling casinos, prostitution, and organized crime. If Satan exists, Trump is the devil incarnate.
The damage done to the foreign policy of the USA by "Vladimir" Trump will last many generations, but it is not too late to restore a modicum of integrity to the institutions of the USA.
- The radical right-wing's class warfare against the middle class. Trump and the radical right-wing Republicans are "the" enemy in gun control, immigration reform, the environment, health care, restrictions on foreign lobbying, and, last but not least, government ethics. I am sorry to say that i cannot find anything good in the Republican Party's current platform, as published on its website. If none of this appeals to you, consider that, unless you are very rich, everything in the Republican Party's agenda is meant to hurt people like you: tax cuts for rich people like Trump and fund cuts for programs that benefit people like you, starting with health care. Your salary is not keeping up with skyrocketing prices, especially in education, health care and housing. Basically, the Republican Party is stealing from the poor to give to the rich. It works: the Republicans give money to the rich, the rich fund their campaigns with Fox News and the likes, and the Republicans win again, so they can give even more money to the rich, and the rich can give even more money to the Republican Party. They all assume that you are an idiot. Surprise them.
- If you are young, remember that, according to all polls, young people: voted against Trump; disagree with the Republican Party on all social issues; disapprove of the Supreme Court; believe in climate change; want to protect the environment; distrust organized religion; and want peaceful relations with the rest of the world. And what did they give you? Trump for president, a Republican house and senate, a Supreme Court that consistently sides against you, a policy to destroy the environment and the whole planet, fanatical evangelical doctrine, a Congress in the pocket of the National Rifle Association, and a corrupt warmongering government. Nothing of what is being done today is done in your name.
Maybe these elections shouldn't be a referendum on Trump, but the Republicans have made it so because the Republicans refused to stand up for their own principles when he trampled on them.
If it is a referendum on Trump, remember the three tests he never took
- He never took a polygraph test (unlike his accusers, who gladly did and passed it)
- He never released his tax returns (unlike all of his political opponents)
- He never took an IQ test (despite telling everybody else that THEY have a low IQ)
There must be a reason.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2018 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
Back to the world news
- (october 2018)
Why Trump Decided to Abandon the Nuclear Treaty with Russia.
He did because this fits in a strategy to distract US public opinion from the
real threat (Russia's cyberattacks against democracy) and to help Russia contain
the rising power, China.
First read this: Why Trump Slapped Sanctions on China.
Trump's decision to abandon the nuclear treaty with Russia is a continuation of
that strategy.
After slapping sanctions on China, with the clear purpose of weakening Russia's
main rival in Asia, a few weeks later
Trump decided to withdraw the USA from a 30-year-old nuclear-arms treaty with Russia, the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces treaty, signed by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987.
On the surface, this sounds like an aggressive step against Russia.
The truth is that Russia already violated this treaty, and the USA knew it but didn't care.
In particular, Russia last year (2017) Russia deployed a new missile, code-named 9M729, that is precisely the kind of
intermediate-range missile banned by that treaty, and Trump never said anything
about it (at the same time that he was saying a lot of things about everything
else).
The real loser is, again, China. China does not represent a threat to
the US mainland because its missiles are mostly... intermediate-range missiles,
but it does represent a threat to Russia and to the US allies in easy Asia.
(So much so that these Russian missiles are located far from the European
border).
The USA could strike China from its mainland or from submarines so it doesn't
need intermediate-range missile to defend its Asian allies, but withdrawing
from the INF treaty will put additional pressure on China, that is not bound
by any treaty to limit its own intermediate-range nuclear missiles in the Pacific.
If the USA deploys intermediate-range missiles in the Pacific, not much will
change for Russia, but a lot will change for China.
You can bet that Trump will now order intermediate-range missiles to be
deployed not against Russia (the country that violated the treaty) but against
China (the country that Russia wants to undermine).
Changing the discussion from cyberwarfare (that is real) to nuclear warfare
(that is just imagined and, hopefully, unlikely to ever happen) is also a way to
distract the US public opinion: Russia did attack the USA with cyberweapons,
nobody attacked the USA with nuclear weapons, and Trump hasn't told the USA
how he plans to defend the USA from (very real) cyberattacks. In other words,
Russia is still free to cyberattack the USA as much as it likes: or, better,
as long as its cyberattacks are directed at helping Trump and the Republicans.
In fact, Russia continues to launch cyberattacks both in the USA and in Europe,
always targeting progressive forces to help authoritarian right-wing parties win elections. Trump's own department of justice keeps indicting Russians for
cyberattacks and cyberespionage (the latest came just hours before Trump's
decision to abandon this treaty, a remarkable coincidence).
Furthermore, Trump's decision to withdraw from this treaty undermines NATO
because it creates a new crisis in Europe, not in the USA: Russia has so far
refrained from deploying these new missiles near Europe, but now it will
have an easy justification to do so, and Russia's intermediate range missiles,
that can reach at best Alaska, could easily reach the whole of Europe.
Obviously, Trump did not ask the USA's European allies their opinion before
creating a new arms race that will affect mainly them.
That is hardly the mission of NATO.
Carl Bildt, a former Swedish prime minister, called Trump's decision (quote) “a gift to Russia that exposes Europe to a growing nuclear threat”.
German foreign minister Heiko Maas said that Trump's decision (quote) “poses difficult questions for us and for Europe”.
Wake up, USA! This "president" is clearly a Russian operative.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2018 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
Back to the world news
- (september 2018)
Why Trump Slapped Sanctions on China
Trump's actions are predictable: he does whatever serves Russia better.
In order to understand Trump's obsession with "punishing" China (at the cost
of causing inflation and possibly a recession in the USA), one just has to
focus on what Putin wants.
Putin has enjoyed several years of unopposed rule in Russia. The last time
that he had to face popular unrest was 2011, a wave of protests that he has
always blamed on Hillary Clinton, hence his anti-Clinton campaign that led
to the election of Donald Trump (See for the whole story of the Putin-Trump Collusion).
Then Obama became president with a policy of peace at all costs.
Then oil prices started going down. Then Russia's economy plunged into an
economic recession. This year (2018) for the first time since 2011 Putin
experienced defeat in elections, although only local ones: four of his
party's candidates were defeated in gubernatorial elections, and the defeats
were so serious that it was impossible for his party to rig the results as
it would have normally done. Putin's approval rating has fallen below 50%.
If elections were held today, Putin may actually lose them.
One obvious reason for Putin's crisis is that Russia's economy has suffered
a lot after oil prices declined under Obama, especially after Obama signed
a deal with Iran (that owes large oil reserves). Putin's prestige was also
largely due to his successful restoration of Russia's status as a global power:
Russia annexed Crimea, saved Assad in Syria, etc. But China is becoming a
problem.
In September 2018 Russia held a massive war exercise, called Vostok-2018 (East-2018), involving some 300,000 personnel, the largest in history. Putin invited
a few thousand Chinese troops to join.
The military exercise took place at the same time that Russia was hosting the
annual Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok.
This conference, launched in 2015, promotes economic cooperation in the Russian Far East and Northeast Asia.
Given that South Korea and Japan are US allies, "northeast Asia" here really
means just Russia, China and North Korea.
The North Korean dictator Jong-un Kim, however, has visited China three times in one year, and zero times Russia (he held meetings with Donald Trump and South Korea's president, but not with Putin).
The Vladivostok conference is dwarfed by the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) formed by China in 1996 that mainly targets Central Asia.
Russia has no visible project to justify its promotion of trade, whereas
China has a massive Belt and Road economic initiative that dwarfs
the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union.
China's influence has clearly surpassed Russia's influence in Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Uzbekistan, etc).
The CAMCA Regional Forum 2018, held in late June 2018 in Azerbaijan's capital Baku to promote regional cooperation, assembled the Central Asian republics, Western politicians and Chinese politicians. If there was a Russian delegate, few noticed him.
Trade between Central Asia and China was $30 billion in 2016, compared with $19 billion with Russia.
Russian anxiety about China's rapid rise as a global power is not a mystery:
the USA is understandably hysterical about the disinformation campaign launched
by Russia to destabilize its institutions, but Russia has launched a similar
information war against China as well.
Nationalist Russian-language media in Central Asia (the equivalent of Fox
News in the USA) routinely spread conspiracy theories (and assorted
"fake news") about China. Their anti-Chinese propaganda has generated fears
that grow proportionally as China's economic influence grows.
Putin is beginning to realize that the real threat to Russia's status as
a global power is no longer the discredited USA (whose president has done
an excellent job of discrediting and partially dismantling all US military
alliances and trade treaties) and is no longer Western Europe (where Brexit,
another Russian-sponsored event, is absorbing the majority of attention),
but China that is slowly but steadily creating a sphere of influence from
Central Asia to Africa.
Therefore Putin has a vested interest in a trade war between the USA and
China that will further weaken the USA and begin eroding China's aura of
invincibility. Putin needs China to get into a recession.
Note that Trump is punishing China for its support of North Korea while
Israel openly sells advanced technology (mostly developed in the USA or in
collaboration with the USA) to Russia. The USA has sanctions against North
Korea but, nominally, also against Russia, except that Trump's USA is not
enforcing the latter. Putin visited Israel twice (the first
Russian leader ever) and Israel's prime minister Netanyahu attended Russia's
military parade. Since both the USA and the European Union limit the sale
of technology to Russia, Israel is a key provider of that technology.
Israel is clearly circumventing the sanctions that the West has imposed on
Russia after Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Trump has never punished Israel for doing this. In fact Trump has
rewarded Israel in all possible ways.
Similar reasons lie behind Trump's sanctions against Iran, set to be
reimposed in November. Iran has complied with the treaty signed with Obama
and all other powers, but that deal has had a terrible effect on Russia:
oil prices collapsed and oil is Russia's main source of revenues.
Putin desperately needs oil prices to go up if he wants to reignite the
Russian economy. Trump came to the rescue: by killing Obama's deal with
Iran, Trump has caused oil prices to reach a four-year high. And they are
likely to increase further in 2019. This will certainly
help Russia get out of its recession (perhaps at the cost of causing a
recession in the USA).
But aren't the sanctions on China justified, given China's infringement
of copyrights and unfair trade? The USA certainly needs to better protect
US firms. It is unfair that Baidu, Wechat and all other Chinese platforms
are available in the USA whereas Google, Facebook, and countless other
platforms are banned in China. China has clearly protected its firms from
US competition. And there is no doubt that too many Western products have been
Something has to be done to balance China's decade-old protectionism.
But sanctions are hardly a good business idea: the Chinese currency has
slumped 10%, and all Asian currencies are devaluating because their businesses
need to compete with Chinese goods. The result is that some Chinese products
will be 25% more expensive in the USA but ALL Asian products will be 10%
cheaper in the USA; which is likely to hurt US producers.
Furthermore, many US products are made with imported parts, and all those
"Made in America" products will become more expensive. The sanctions will
mainly punish US consumers.
For the record: while copyright infringements by Chinese companies have been
widely publicized, any teenager who is looking for pirated videos, music or books knows well that the most popular websites for this kind of things are Russian.
And, still, Trump doesn't seem to care if Russians commit copyright
infringement, only if Chinese do.
As for "unfair trade",
Russia's current account surplus hit $50 billion in the first half of 2018
compared with China's $11 billion: almost five times more, despite
the fact that Russia's GDP is only one tenth of China's
($1.2 trillion vs $11 trillion).
Finally, Trump's attacks on China are simply a way to distract public opinion
from Russia and from the many scandals (See The Trump Scandals).
The world economy is much more entangled than Trump's supporters can understand,
and Trump is much more corrupt than they want to admit.
The sanctions against China are a gift to Russian consumers, not to US consumers.
P.S.
Ironically, the "trade war" that Trump started with China ended up hurting
mostly the USA. What happened is simple: the Chinese currency plummeted, and
so did many other currencies of developing countries, a fact that made imports
cheaper across the board. The global effect was that in March 2019
the USA's trade deficit in goods with the rest of the world rose to its highest level in history.
Some Chinese goods got more expensive because of the sanctions, but some of
these goods cannot be easily replaced and so the sanctions simply
became a tax on US consumers, while the trade deficit got bigger, not smaller.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2018 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
Back to the world news
- (september 2018)
Why Kavanaugh should be Confirmed.
The televised Senate hearing on Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination
was a masterpiece of Machiavellian politics by Dianne Feinstein: she dropped
the bomb of Christine Blasey Ford's accusations against
Brett Kavanaugh at the last minute, creating a Shakespearian dilemma for
the Republican Party. The Republicans (who made the additional mistake of
sending 11 males to judge the veracity of this story) are in a lose-lose
situation: if they confirm Kavanaugh despite the accusations (that have not
been disproved at all), the majority of voters, especially the female ones,
will feel that Republicans side with violent sexist redneck males no matter
what ("women always lose" as a CNN commentator put it); if they don't confirm
him, they risk that the Democrats will win back the House in the November
elections and sabotage any new candidate for the Supreme Court (exactly what
the Republicans did to Obama when they had the power to do it).
Feinstein is a genius. But this all amounts to vicious politics, not to
constructive cooperation.
Here is what a rational person should learn from the televised hearing.
First of all, both Ford and Kavanaugh looked convincing: why not assume that
they are both telling the truth? Ford remembers clearly that
Kavanaugh tried to rape her, and he doesn't remember it because he was drunk
(as countless witnesses have seen him to be during those high-school and college
years). Secondly, an FBI investigation wouldn't prove much: it would just
deliver a long list of unreliable interviews with witnesses, friends and
relatives about something that happened 36 years ago. Thirdly and more
importantly, this is, again, something that happened 36 years ago. While i do
believe that something happened, i don't think that anyone should be judged based on
what he or she did at the age of 17.
Kavanaugh went on to become, as far as we know, a good father and husband,
and, crucially, a good lawyer, with stellar recommendations from his peers.
Hence he is qualified for the job. What he did when he was 17 has little or
nothing to do with what he will do when he is 60, 70 or 80.
Democrats are understandably bitter that a very conservative judge,
Brett Kavanaugh, will become a judge of the Supreme Court only because
the Republicans boycotted Obama's pick for that post,
Merrick Garland, another well-qualified judge. The Republicans never gave
him a chance to prove his worth. They boycotted him on principle.
The Democrats felt and feel cheated, and indeed they were.
But it is not Kavanaugh who wrote the rules of the game.
If Democrats don't like the rules, they should change them when they have
a chance: remove the electoral college so idiots like George W Bush and
scumbags like Donald Trump don't become president despite losing the election,
change the number of senators per state so that California isn't grotesquely
limited to the same number of senators as Rhode Island, and maybe change the
way Supreme Court judges are appointed.
The rules being what they are, there is no reason to deny
Brett Kavanaugh, a well-respected judge, to become a Supreme Court judge.
Last but not least, the USA currently has a president who is the "molester-in-chief" (besides many other things). Whatever judge Kavanaugh did 36 years ago pales in comparison with what Trump did to women throughout his life. If Trump is allowed to remain president of the USA, it is hard to understand why
Kavanaugh should be denied a seat on the Supreme Court.
If Trump, the "molester-in-chief", was never subjected to this kind of interrogation and investigation, why was Kavanaugh?
Voters will have a chance to express their opinion in a few weeks, at the
November elections. If voters feel that their government (president,
Congress and Supreme Court) does not represent
their will and their values, they can punish their government by voting
against the Republican Party that now controls all the institutions of that government.
This is not to say that the Kavanaugh hearings were a complete waste of time.
Many commentators (mostly friendly to the Republicans) have noted that this hearings will have a devastating effect on the willingness of honest civil servants to accept positions of power: your life can be ruined by a woman who simply accuses you (without proof) of sexually assauting her when you were a teenager, and you will have no way to defend yourself from the media frenzy.
From now on, for any male candidate to any position there will be at least one
woman coming forward to call him a sex molester. We risk that honest men will
choose not to run for important positions for fear that a woman will call them
rapists and drag them into this kind of national spectacle.
The CNN commentator who said "women always lose" was wrong: if a woman accuses
an influential man of sexual molestation, as long as it cannot be proven because
it happened way in the past and/or there were no witnesses,
she automatically becomes a celebrity and the man is automatically considered
guilty by a majority of the public.
There might be a bright side though:
Kavanaugh and his college friends belong to the generation that thought that drinking and violent behavior were ok, forgiven later in life by responsible behavior such as hard work and going to church.
This episode may send the message to millions of teenagers that this is not the case anymore: what you do now will haunt you for the rest of your life.
Show your penis once at a party and 36 years from now your career may be ruined.
A positive outcome of this televised circus could well be that male teenagers will think twice about molesting girls, and that both males and females will think twice about getting drunk or high (which is not very healthy anyway).
Even the fact that the only witness of the attempted rape (Kavanaugh's best friend and drinking buddy) could not testify because he spent his life fighting alcoholism might save a lot of kids from getting drunk: do you want to end up like Kavanaugh's best friend?
Two years ago Donald Trump's success sent the exact opposite message: that, no matter what an immoral lowlife you have been and still are, you can still be successful and even become president.
The Kavanaugh hearings restore some sense of moral responsibility.
(See The Trump Scandals for much more important issues).
TM, ®, Copyright © 2018 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
Back to the world news
- (september 2018)
The world is laughing at Trump the way it laughed at Mussolini in the 1920s .
Trivia: Who said "Make America Great"? Benito Mussolini. In 1927 Fox News Service filmed Benito Mussolini telling immigrants to `make America great'
- (september 2018)
The Evangelicals are a Satanic Cult
Evangelical Christians are the Christian equivalent of fanatical Muslims.
They are the jihadists of the Christian world.
They believe in the letter of the Bible the same way that radical Muslims believe in the letter of the Quran and the Hadith.
The evangelicals entered politics in the 1980s with movements such as Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority and Ralph Reed's Christian Coalition, and they have influenced each and every election.
A 2018 poll by the Public Religion Research Institute showed that Trump's
approval rate among white evangelical Christians held steady at 75%, actually
higher than when he was inaugurated.
The evangelicals are in fact one of the few
demographic groups that still supports Trump.
Get it? The most corrupt, immoral president of all time, a congenital liar
who cheated on all his wives, a con man and a lowlife,
the "molester-in-chief," is supported almost ONLY by the evangelicals.
The moral bankruptcy of this group is not news.
Evangelicals have consistently backed the most immoral politicians in US politics.
But the fact that they voted for the Antichrist revealed their true faith:
these are not merely gullible, ignorant people, they are envoys of Satan
himelf, determined to infiltrate the USA and make armageddon happen for real.
In a sense they are the US equivalent of Al Qaeda, Taliban and ISIS; but in another sense they are much worse, because their (cosmic) goal is the destruction of morality itself.
We used to think of them as fanatical oddballs that didn't believe in Darwinian evolution and took the Bible literally.
There is a correlation between scientific education and hostility towards superstitions (like the one about the son of a god who resurrected after three days etc),
and so we were not surprised that evangelicals opposed scientific education.
After all, religions are the ultimate fake news: it is vital for them that
people don't know the facts
(see Jesus and Christianity,
A brief history of Islam,
Judaism).
But their support and jubilation at the perverted actions of the Antichrist crossed a red line.
There seems to be no amount of scandals that can turn them against him
(see The Trump Scandals).
Take the fact that they enthusiastically embraced Trump's nomination of radical right-wing judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. That would be ok, but, when a highly
credible woman came forward accusing this judge of attempted rape, they didn't
do the Christian thing of condemning the evil act: they
expressed frustration that Senate Republicans and the White House were not
protecting the judge. Get it? They didn't consider for a second that
the woman could be telling the truth, and this judge could be morally unfit
for the job: they rejoiced at the idea of an immoral Supreme Court judge.
Incidentally, the evangelicals are also the single most important factor in
the decline of Christianity in the USA: who wants to be a Christian when this is the company you have to keep?
The Pew Foundation's polls paint a bleak picture for the future of the
Christian faith in the USA:
the number of young people who don't consider themselves religious is
23% among Generation Xs (born between 1965-1980),
34% among older millennials (born between 1981-1989),
and 36% among younger millennials (born between 1990 and 1996).
In one generation they will be the majority and the USA will stopped being
a Christian-majority country.
The evangelicals have caused more damage to Christianity than all Islamic jihadists combined.
At every step, the evangelicals have proven their true allegiance:
the evangelicals work for the devil.
The evangelicals are the enemies of Christianity, the enemies of Jesus.
Worse: they are pure evil.
Metaphorically speaking, they will rot in hell.
The problem is that they want everybody to rot there with them.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2018 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
Back to the world news
- (september 2018)
How "America" Became Great.
The USA is correctly anxious about the near future in which China will surpass the USA and the European Union to become the largest economy in the world. But this is inevitable given the different populations: China has 1.4 billion people versus the USA's 0.3 billion and the EU's 0.5 billion (minus 0.06 billion Brits who will be leaving soon). The US economy will inevitably be surpassed by China's economy. As long as the USA remains a much smaller country (population-wise), it cannot remain the world's economic superpower.
The USA was a poor country after the civil war of 1861. It remained a very minor regional power until the turn of the century when the population started growing rapidly due to... immigration. The 1880 census counted 50 million people in the USA. European immigration skyrocketed in the 1890s and peaked in 1907.
The census of 1910 counted 92 million citizens living in the USA, almost double the population of 1880, of which 13.5 million (one out of seven) were immigrants.
In 1910 the foreign-born population was 14.7%.
Those were the years when the USA became an economic world power.
By the end of World War I (1918), the USA had
the world's largest economy, despite a number of economic recessions (the great depression of 1873-79, the great panic of 1893 and the great panic of 1896, the 1901 stock crash, the panic of 1907 and the panic of 1910).
Despite a civil war and frequent economic crises, the USA managed to become the world's largest economy.
This was achieved through sheer population growth.
(The other great economic boom of the USA, in the 1950s-60s was also due to demographics: millions of women joined the workforce).
The great wave of immigrants of a century ago significantly diluted the original
Protestant and Anglosaxon core of the USA as millions of Italian, Polish and Irish Catholics entered the country, while California attracted Chinese and Japanese immigrants.
Today many white citizens resent the influx of families with Hispanic
last names not only because they frequently settle in the USA without a valid
visa but also because all these Hispanics are diluting the ethnic core of the
nation (European, if not Anglosaxon). Luckily for Asians, the white opposition is mostly
based in the Midwest and the South, where relatively few Indians and Chinese
settle, otherwise there would also be resentment against Asians (Buddhists,
Hindus and Muslims who obviously dilute even more the European Christian core
- the Hispanics at least are Christians).
Statistics show that immigration from Asia is actually growing more rapidly
than immigration from Latin America.
The economy has been doing quite well since 2012. It turns out that, yet again,
this corresponds to a wave of immigration.
Government data show that in 2017 foreign-born residents were 13.7% of the population (44.5 million), the highest percentage since 1910.
Those data also show that
immigrants tend to be educated and peaceful, with a salary above the median,
and a credit score above the average.
Alas, we know too well that
the native population tends to be gun-loving and church-going, and
often drops out of college if not even of high school, and runs huge credit-card debts.
The families of these
immigrants tend to be very stable (with an extremely low percentage of
divorces, out-of-wedlock children, etc), whereas the majority of native couples
divorce, and the majority of native children have either more than two parents
or less than two.
The economy has been doing well since 2012 but the native population has a very good reason to be hostile to immigrants: the economy has mainly benefited the immigrants. The net worth of US families has not increased by much: what is increased is their debt.
The ones who have done really well during this economic boom are the foreign-born ones.
Plenty of illegal immigrants have started humble businesses that are thriving
(house cleaning, nursing, pool services, you name it). Legal immigrants
tend to be highly educated and enjoy good salaries (for example, engineers
at high-tech firms). Whether legal or illegal, the economy has been good for immigrants. Not so good for those born and raised in the USA.
A typical sight in Silicon Valley is families of Indian and Chinese engineers
shopping at a hardware store whose staff is traditional white blue-collar kids,
kids who totally missed the high-tech revolution, and the high-paying jobs that came with it, while the Indian and Chinese engineers are right in the middle of it.
Who is making "America" great?
See also Rapists and Murderers.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2018 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
Back to the world news
- (July 2018)
The Greatest Humiliation in US History?.
Putin and Trump met in Finland. Putin treated Trump like the governor of a
Russian colony, but, more importantly, Trump behaved like the governor of
a Russian colony.
- (July 2018)
History repeats itself and so do facial expressions.
- (June 2018)
Rapists and Murderers.
"Vladimir" Trump, the man who loves only brutal dictators like Putin and Kim who have murdered thousands of people (sometimes including members of their own family), has repeatedly called for zero tolerance on illegal immigration calling
the Hispanic immigrants "rapists and murderers".
I am shocked that relatively few people stood up and told the nation what many
of us know: illegal immigrants from Latin America are the hardest working people
that i have seen in my life after the Chinese.
They don't have time to be rapists and murderers because they work very
hard every day (except sunday, when they go to mass). Within a couple of
years, they run their little family business. They serve the community
and they pay taxes. Those are the illegal immigrants that we know.
Trump seems to know a different kind, and that could be because he employed
illegal immigrants of a different kind at his shady businesses.
Now he thinks that all Hispanics are crooks like he, his family and his friends
are.
I wish the same could be said of white Christians. Pretty much all
serial killers and all school shooters are white Christians. They indeed are
rapists and murderers.
(See What is wrong with White Anglosaxon Christians?)
But back to the illegal immigrants. The reason they are illegal is that
Congress (widely dominated by Trump's party for the last generation)
never passed immigration reform. That negligence (sabotage?) has had two
tragic consequences: 1. Many immigrants in search of a job or fleeing
conflicts had to enter illegally because there just wasn't any reasonable
way to enter legally; and 2. (Yes, there is a second consequence) Many legal
immigrants who had higher education and valuable skills were discouraged
from staying. How many bright engineers are willing to wait three years in
line to get a green card when they can get a highly paid job in Europe or
Canada or Australia or Singapore? Not many. None of my Swiss, Scandinavian,
German, Singaporean friends has remained in the USA. They all moved to
countries that are friendlier to immigrants. This is a complete reversal
of what was happening one century ago. Sure enough you can see the effects
on science: who invented the Artificial Intelligence that we use today?
Hinton, LeCun, Bengio, Schmidhuber, DeepMind, etc. None of them was working
in the USA (Canada, Germany, Britain, etc). The top robotics scientists
are also foreign-born. Sure, Google and Stanford can attract them to Silicon
Valley, and thus the world can still think that the USA is leading in A.I.,
but the truth is that the USA is sending away all the top scientists and
then only places like Silicon Valley have the money to bring them back.
Over the last year the teams that won the most important competitions in
A.I. are all Chinese. Most of them studied in the USA, but the USA made it
very difficult for them to stay. (Then, of course, after sending them
back to China under threat of deportation, Fox News and Trump will accuse
them of being "spies" who stole US technology).
Once you create the impression that you are a country hostile to immigrants
the damage is done: you won't discourage the refugees coming from warzones
or extreme poverty but you easily discourage the ones who have valuable
skills desired by many other countries.
But back to the illegal immigrants. Every study shows that they are less
likely to commit violent crimes, less likely to divorce, and less likely
to have debts. In other words, they build strong family ties and they
save money. I guess this has become un-American in the age of Trump
(a man who filed bankruptcies six times and got married three times plus
extramarital affairs).
Note that not a single Islamic terrorist ever entered the USA from Mexico:
if that border is so unprotected clearly at least one Al Qaeda or ISIS terrorist
must have entered from it? Surprise: there isn't a single case of an Islamic
terrorist entering from Mexico. Why? Because Mexico, unlike the USA,
actually does a very good job of screening immigrants, whether legal or illegal.
Anybody coming from Mexico has been de facto screened by a much more efficient
country, the country of Mexico. It is true that Mexico lets families flow
through all the way to the US border, but it is also true that Mexico is
virtually impregnable to terrorists, and so de facto it has protected the
USA from terrorist attacks. We wish we could say the same of the cities of
the USA that allowed 19 Al Qaeda terrorists to travel around the USA in 2001.
There is no question that illegal immigrants are illegal and no country
should tolerate illegal acts, but it is wildly misleading to call it "criminal"
as if looking for a job were morally equivalent to killing 17 people at the Parkland high school. There is a big difference between these two crimes, and
any country in the world would be more concerned about school shootings than
about job seekers (alas, there is only one country that has the problem of mass shootings, the USA).
You can't bring back to life those 17 high-school kids, that's an irreversible
crime; but you can easily make the illegal immigrants legal if you give them
a way to become legal. So the two "crimes" are wildly different in nature,
scope, effect and remedy.
Incidentally, any US citizen who wants to invoke ethical principles should first
and foremost ponder why these immigrants are willing to risk everything to
cross the US border. It is certainly true that their regimes failed them,
but in many cases the US government has been an accomplice to those regime's
corruption if not the very cause. It is despicable that the USA now refuses
to take in more Syrian refugees given that all the trouble in that region
started with an inept invasion of Iraq by the USA. ISIS did not exist and
Al Qaeda was limited to Afghanistan before the Republican Party of the USA
decided to install a new order there. The same party is in power now. It should
at least feel responsible (if not guilty) for the new mess that has replaced
the previous one. People who live there are not sure at all what was better:
Saddam Hussein or ISIS? The Taliban or an endless civil war? Ditto in Central
America, that has been destabilized by a drug war largely caused by the USA:
the USA is the top destination of drugs and therefore, indirectly, the USA
is the top financier of the druglords, and probably their top supplier of guns.
The families of Honduras and parts of Mexico live in terror. The druglords
are among the most brutal criminals in history, ready to torure,
decapitate and burn anybody. You would flee just like these families flee.
And yes you would take your children with you. The USA is partly responsible
for the drug war that is destroying those societies. Simply building walls
(and concentration camps for children) is not the ethical way to solve problems
that have been caused by the ineptitude and/or corruption and of US governments.
Besides the ethical reasons (that seem to matter less and less for US citizens
who vote scumbags like Trump in power),
there are practical and economic reasons to allow more immigrants in.
The classic one is that the USA is a country of
immigrants, and immigrants from Fermi (nuclear power) to Von Braun (spaceships)
turned the USA from a group of poor colonies (whose greatest achievement had
been the bloodiest civil war in history) into the world's superpower.
But there are new important
reasons to allow more people in, and many more. To start with, the only way that
the USA can match China's GPD is by increasing its population. China is
actually a bit smaller than the USA, but it has four times the US population
(1.3 billion to 0.3 billion).
It is an unfair race: inevitably, China's economy will quickly pass the USA's
economy, and the gap will only grow over time. The day when the average
Chinese becomes as wealthy as the average US citizen, China will have an economy four times bigger.
That day the USA will be as powerful versus China as Japan is today
versus the USA. In other words, the USA will be a greatly diminished power,
or, better, not a power at all.
If the USA wants to compete with China, it has to find a way to populate
its immense empty spaces, and immigration is the natural way to do so.
In fact, it has been precisely the way it worked until recently: the western
territories were colonized by waves and waves of immigrants (Europeans,
Chinese, Japanese and Mexicans).
Another reason to rapidly increase the population is simply the shortage of
labor. The average household is paying a huge price for the scarcity of
handymen, plumbers, electricians, car mechanics and so on. There are also
jobs that no US citizen wants to do, like cleaning streets or picking up
garbage. Those are actually essential services. The last thing we need is
immigration based on merit: we certainly can use scientists and engineers,
but we desperately need people willing to provide the essential services
of a city, which, unfortunately, tend to fetch a very low pay but that, fortunately,
don't require a lot of schooling. Those are ideal jobs for poor immigrants,
willing to work for salaries that are lower than the average.
The demographic problem is compounded by the fact that the US population is
rapidly aging. Without immigration the US population will rapidly become
too old to take care of itself. Most immigrants are young and can balance
this trend. Last but not least, someone will have to take care of those
millions of US citizens in their 80s, 90s, 100s... The USA does not have
enough nurses to take care of its aging population. Given a much higher
demand for nurses than the supply of nurses, only the very rich can afford the rates of the 24-hour
at-home nursing services.
Illegal immigrants have been crucial to keep alive tens
of thousands of elderly people who cannot afford assistance services at
regular rates (not to mention to allow young couples an evening to the movies:
many babysitters are "au pairs" who overstay or cheat on their visa).
The barrier to immigration is one cause of the skyrocketing cost of living in the USA.
We have to pay higher and higher prices for basic services (and wait longer
and longer to get the service done) because of labor shortages in many areas,
from plumbing to haircuts. While my state was discussing whether to give
illegal immigrants a driver license, i was in a long line at the Department of
Motor Vehicles (DMV). The line is chronically long because our state doesn't
have the money to hire more people and open more branches. Ironically, a
simple solution would be to hire thousands of illegal immigrants.
A few of us would have to practice our Spanish, but that's infinitely better
than standing in line for hours. Therefore even government offices could
use a few thousands "illegal" immigrants (who would therefore become legal,
and not only legal but also indispensable).
The price of legalizing "illegal" immigrants (people who want to work in
this country), or, better, of allowing more immigrants into the country,
is negligible compared with the advantage in making services more affordable for
millions of families, higher GDP, and higher tax revenues.
So the truth about the illegal immigrants is that they could be the solution
to several pressing problems. Today they are a problem. Tomorrow they could
be the solutions to other, more important, problems.
The transition from today to tomorrow may not be trivial
(obviously we are not excited at the idea of rewarding the foreigners who broke
the law over the thousands or millions of foreigners who did not break the law
and are still in their country, waiting for a lawful way to emigrate to the USA),
but it is silly to simply deport them without first checking if they could
be useful, and it is demented to call them "rapists and murderers".
Maybe they came simply because there was a demand, not because
they enjoy walking thousands of kms and risking their lives.
Maybe there is
a demand, maybe an increasing demand that is costing US citizens a lot more,
a cost that could be eliminated if the USA simply made it easy for millions
of immigrants to enter (or remain) legally.
And, if we really have to be racist, let's at least target the
group that deserves it: the serial killers and the school shooters are almost
all white Christian males, and mostly with an Anglosaxon last name.
If you really have to be racist, at least target the right group:
white Christians.
Maybe start with the evangelicals, who do not deserve US citizenship, nor
protection under US laws, since they explicitly state that their priority is to be loyal to someone else (a fictional god) before the US constitution.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2018 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
Back to the world news
- (June 2018)
Beyond Dementia: how a Young Upstart took advantage of a Senile Moron.
The short summary is this. Kim keeps getting everything he wants: he got
the nuclear weapons, as he wanted; he got the long-range missiles, as he
wanted; he got recognition from the US president, as he wanted; he got
a meeting with the US president, as he wanted; and now he got the suspension
of US military exercises in Korea, as he wanted.
Trump conceded everything without getting anything in return.
Everything that he claimed during the (rambling) one-hour press conference
is a fraction of what previous presidents achieved in 1994 and 2006,
and a fraction of what his own team was trying to achieve.
Basically, he got absolutely no concession from Kim.
Kim simply restated what his grandfather and his father always said:
a commitment to a denuclearized Korean peninsula, but that has always meant
that the USA should withdraw and leave the North Korean dictatorship thriving on.
During his (rambling) press conference Trump admitted his concessions,
that start with granting the dictator of a tiny country such monumental
honor of meeting with the most powerful man in the world,
granting the North Korean regime an international legitimacy that North Korea never had before,
followed by something that North Korea always demanded,
the suspension of military exercises with South Korea;
and then he expressed (rambled on)
a lot of wishful thinking that hopefully this time giving North Korea what
it wanted will lead to better relations.
He (Trump) repeated what North Korea has always said: that
the military exercises with South Korea are "provocative" actions.
Basically, Trump said that North Korea has always been right and the USA
always wrong.
The radical left-wing liberals of the world can rejoyce: they've always
been right that it was the USA to provoke North Korea, not the other way
around.
Of course, these are big wins for Kim. Back home he will be treated like
a big winner. See it the way his people will see it (and, actually, the whole
world will see it): North Korea's young dictator Kim defied the USA and
sped up his program of nuclear and missile tests, and then coerced the USA to
sit down at the negotiating table, accepting North Korea as an equal power,
and has obtained recognition of its legitimacy and
security guarantees. It even obtained the the USA cancels the "provocative"
games with South Korea as North Korea has demanded for decades.
Trump rambled on for one hour about his "historic" meeting.
It was indeed historic how a president of the USA (or, for that matter, a
leader of any power in history) got swindled by a young thug.
He got absolutely nothing
about North Korea freezing its nuclear program or its
long-range missile program,
not even a pledge to halt the nuclear tests;
nothing about destroying the bombs and missiles that it already built
and that can strike the USA,
and nothing about allowing international inspectors to the nuclear sites,
The US public should be terrified that the USA has been cheated by North
Korea,
and even more terrified that Trump doesn't seem to realize how he was cheated
by this young thug.
Incidentally, it was shocking to watch the commentators on Fox News praise
this (embarrassing) meeting and praise the (insignificant) outcome. Fox News
and the other radical right-wing media have always considered as treason the
very idea of meeting with North Korea's dictator. They crucified
Obama when he said publicly that he was willing to do so. They backed
the Republican Party in 1994 when the Republican Party, having finally won
the majority in Congress, killed Bill Clinton's plan to start negotiations
with North Korea (which at the time didn't have nuclear weapons yet).
Within a few weeks Fox News has completely changed the narrative depicting
a meeting with North Korea's president as a honorable, corageous and even
smart action.
Imagine if Obama ever said of dictator Kim: "His people love him". Well, that's
precisely what Trump said the following day, lavishing praise on the dictator
who presides over the number-one terror regime in the world.
It was surreal to watch radical right-wing commentator Sean Hannity rave about
the Singapore meeting over bombastic patriotic music just like the Pravda of
the Soviet Union used to do (and also like the media of Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy used to do).
Basically, now Fox News endorses the views held for decades by
communists, and by left-wing commentators like Noam Chomsky: these always
argued that the USA was "provoking" North Korea and that the US president should
negotiate with the communist dictator.
One has to wonder who is paying these Fox News commentators for swinging
so radically from the radical right to the radical left in such a radically
short time.
"Vladimir" Trump really wanted the meeting with North Korea's dictator
Jong-un Kim (the last name is Kim, not Jong-un). It was probably a
mix of ego and of strategy. He desperately needs a story in foreign
policy that is not just "I am delivering everything Putin ever wanted to
achieve" and he desperately needs distractions from the investigation in
his collusion with Russia.
But it was during Trump's presidency that North Korea achieved the capability
to strike the USA with nuclear weapons. You'd expect Trump to be at least
a little worried and upset about this legacy of his.
Instead Trump keeps proving, time and again, that he is only good at destroying.
He has already destroyed the Atlantic alliance and
the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), not to mention the friendship with Canada,
and is set to deliver more destruction to his master Putin.
Trump the destroyer is just unable to build anything.
And he proves, time and again, that values don't matter to him. He hardly
understands that this Kim just killed his uncle and his brother, and that
millions of people are enslaved in North Korea.
It wasn't difficult to predict what the (very rational and very smart) Kim
wanted from Trump.
See my past predictions:
The North Korean Crisis: A Tale of Two Madmen (or just one?) and
Is North Korea about to Dump China for the USA?.
But the way Kim outsmarted and ridiculed Trump was unexpected even by the
standards of Trump actions.
He is beyond treason: he is simply mentally incapable.
The whole world sees who the winner of this match was.
It wasn't even a match. It was the equivalent of a young smart dude stealing
the wallet from an old senile rambling dotard. And the senile dotard is still
telling everyone that the thief was right to steal his wallet,
and that refusing to give the wallet to the thief would be a "provocative" act.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2018 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
Back to the world news
- (June 2018)
Unhappy America: Suicide rates are up in every state.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2018 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
Back to the world news
- (June 2018)
The Truth about Trump's Tariffs.
The radical right-wing media take anything that "Vladimir" Trump says as absolute truth
without any fact-checking (just like the Pravda used to do in the Soviet Union
and just like Russia Today does with anything that Putin says).
It takes a few minutes of research to find out that "Vladimir" Trump lied and that the
facts are different, sometimes wildly different.
"Vladimir" Trump has lied about (just to mention the main ones):
- Barack Obama's birthplace
- Which side he himself supported on the Iraq War
- The size of his inauguration crowd (rolling my eyes)
- Voter fraud
- A terrorist attack in Sweden (that never happened)
- Mexican immigrants
- The border wall (whose construction has NOT started, and Mexico will certainly NOT pay for it)
- The sanctions on China (he withdrew them)
- The number of job created since he took office (the economy created 3.9 million jobs in Obama's last 18 months and only 3.3 million jobs during Trump's first 18 months)
- Hillary Clinton (no, she had not committed a crime, unlike "Vladimir" Trump, and no she will not be "locked up")
- The trade deficits (The USA, which still is the world's third largest exporter, enjoys a trade surplus with Australia, Brazil, Argentina, Britain and some other 90 countries)
- The hush money paid by his attorney to porn star Stormy Daniels
- Cheating on his wives
- The "13 angry democrats" conspiracy theory (to start with, Robert Mueller is a life-long Republican)
- And of course the whole Russia investigation (that so far has proven false all of his statements except, so far, the denial that a video exists of him having an orgy with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel)
So no surprise that everything he said about trade with the European Union was false. The European Union actually has the exact same average tariffs of the USA: 1.6% (source: World Bank). Japan has an even lower average, at 1.4%. Canada has the lowest of any country in the world: 0.8%.
On the other hand, Russia has one of the highest among major nations, 3.4%.
But notoriously "Vladimir" Trump doesn't care about how Russia hurts the USA.
There is also the simple fact that trade deficits calculate only the goods
that are sent back and forth the border. Those goods account for about 10%
of the US economy and that's the old declining economy that only third-world
countries try to protect. The economy of the future is service, and mostly
online. Progress and prosperity also largely depend on the flow of capital.
The US is a net beneficiary of the flow of capitals in the world.
If the USA stops buying German cars and Canadian steel,
those countries might make it harder for their investors to send money to
the USA. Europe and China are the main contributors to venture capital in
the USA. That's the money that drives Silicon Valley, possibly the only
field in which the USA is still the world's leading country.
Finally, someone should mention that the USA has a national debt of
21 trillion dollars.
It skyrocketed after Trump became president, and it is likely to increase a
lot more after his tax cuts for the rich. How does the USA cope with the
largest debt in the world? It still prints money, a lot of money, and
expects the world to still buy dollars. It also issues a lot of bonds,
and it expects the world to buy them. The biggest buyers? China and Europe.
Punishing your main creditors with tariffs doesn't seem like a good strategy
for the long term.
Cina remains the largest foreign holder of US treasuries.
If trade imbalance were a good reason to slap tariffs on a country's products,
surely Israel would pay a price for its huge trade imbalance with the USA?
The USA imports two dollars of goods for every dollar that Israel imports
of US goods. And if the imports of steel were the main reason for the tariffs,
surely Russia would be punished too, wouldn't it? The USA imports the same
amount of steel from China and Russia, but "Vladimir" Trump wants to punish
only China, not Russia.
So... if the tariffs were NOT the real reason for starting a trade war with the USA's traditional allies of Canada, Japan and Europe, what was the real reason
for "Vladimir" Trump to attack them?
All you have to do is to read Where we stand with the Trump-Russia investigation.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2018 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
Back to the world news
- (June 2018)
The New New New World Order: Trump wants Russia in the G7.
Trump barely showed up at the G7 Summit and did little more than ask that
Russia be readmitted in the club (it was expelled after it invaded Ukraine).
Trump wants Russia to sit down with the Western powers. Not China, that will
soon be the world's largest economy, and not India, another juggernaut with
a much bigger economy than Russia. Trump wants Russia only.
Then Trump left for his meeting with North Korea's dictator Kim Jung-un,
who is getting much more attention from the US president than any of the
NATO allies (allies which, incidentally, have economies that are hundreds of
times bigger than North Korea's).
A few days earlier,
Trump slapped sanctions against European companies (and it is no
coincidence that some of the German companies punished by Trump are the
ones that, under sanctions imposed by the European Union to punish Russia,
stopped trading with Russia) as well as Japanese and Canadian companies.
When he became president, his first major decision was to scrap the TPP
that would have created the largest economic alliance in history ever.
Meanwhile, China is hosting the meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation
Organization. Mostly ignored by US media, this meeting is attended by
Russia's president Putin, India's prime minister Modi, Iran's president
Hassan Rouhani, Pakistan's president, etc.
The growing gap between the USA and its traditional allies is
not only the making of a senile scumbag who became president by accident.
One can sense palpable hostility towards Europe and Japan on pretty much any Fox News panel (Fox News is the president's mouthpiece but also the main source of opinionated news for Republican voters).
The anti-European pro-Russian front may not represent the majority of the US
population, but it holds the power.
The largest economy in the world is the economy of the European Union.
Very soon, the largest economy in the world will be China, which already
controls world trade more than anyone else.
See if you can find the Russian economy in this chart of the largest economies in the world:
But Trump wants Russia in the G7 (G8), and doesn't seem to think that China
and India (2.5 billion people) matter.
The reason the USA was the most powerful country in the world was not just
its large arsenal of nuclear weapons (Russia actually has more) but the fact
that the USA was allied with the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth and
seventh largest economies in the world (Japan, Germany, France, Britain,
Italy and Canada). In other words, it wasn't the USA against its enemies,
but the "West" against its enemies. Japan was not defeated by the USA: it
was defeated by the USA, Britain and (pre-communist) China.
Hitler was not defeated by the USA: it was defeated by Britain, the Soviet Union and the USA (and several national antifascist movements).
The Soviet Union was contained not by the USA but by NATO, which means
the USA, Britain, France, and many other countries.
Communist China was contained not by the USA but by the USA, Japan, South
Korea and Taiwan.
The USA's real strength lay in its ability to form these alliances, an ability
which in turn was due to the appeal of the capitalist democratic model of the
USA, and that was strengthened more by trade than by ideology.
That is why Putin's main goal all these years has been to split the Western
alliance: the USA loses 80% of its power if it's left alone in the world;
in fact, the USA becomes a little bit like Russia, a nuclear power that has
virtually no friends and therefore is left to count its atomic bombs while
the rest of the world thrives on. Trump is delivering what Putin wanted:
dismantling the alliances of the USA.
Trump delivered Syria to Putin and now delivers the dismantling of the Western
institutions to Putin.
Europe and East Asia have to wake up to the fact that the USA is hopelessly
unstable and unreliable, and more vulnerable to Russian manipulations than
any developing country.
After killing the TPP,
Trump is now making the G7 obsolete and irrelevant while Xi is making the Shanghai Cooperation Group more and more relevant.
There aren't many choices. Europe is more aligned with China than with the USA,
both on trade and on foreign policy. So are Japan and South Korea.
The sensible course of action is to
create a Europe-Iran-India-China-Far East axis to counterbalance the three
nuclear madmen: Putin, Trump and Netanyahu.
It will be a very dangerous world, a world in which the (mostly)
non-nuclear alliance gets richer and happier while the nuclear alliance sinks
in scandals, corruption, nepotism, incompetence and warmongering.
The nuclear alliance will be tempted to use its only valuable resource:
its weapons.
That's what the three militaristic powers of the 1930s ended up doing
(Hitler's Germany, Japan and Mussolini's Italy).
There is a slim chance that the US electorate votes against Trump's party
and therefore greatly reins in Trump's pro-Russian drive, but even that
won't change the fact that the USA is a country that cannot be trusted,
with an electoral system that borders on grotesque.
You never know which crazy idiot is going to be elected next.
We thought that it couldn't get any worse than George W Bush. Now you may think
that it cannot get any worse than Donald Trump. But the US electoral system
is so out of control
(electoral college, gerrymandering, irrational senate representation,
and so on, further compounded by foreign-funded lobbying,
Christian fundamentalism,
and a deluge of fake news by radical-right wing media)
that even a serial killer could be elected.
Trump about Canada's democratically elected prime minister Justin Trudeau: "very dishonest and weak" (June 2018).
Trump about North Korea's dictator Jong-un Kim (who, among many other things, murdered his uncle and his half-brother): "It's a great honor to be with you" (three days later).
TM, ®, Copyright © 2018 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
Back to the world news
- (May 2018)
Why Kill the Iran Deal Now
Trump was reportedly counselled against abandoning the Iranian nuclear deal by secretary of state Rex Tillerson, national security advisor HR McMaster and secretary of defence James Mattis. Opinion polls showed a vast majority of citizens in favor of staying in the deal. But Trump preferred to obey Netanyahu's orders and withdraw. (See The USA is a banana republic).
Israel wants a war with Iran for its own reasons: it correctly views Iran as the only country that could potentially become a regional rival, as it was in the old days. See
The biggest scam in the Middle East: Israel's war on Iran
Netanyahu is paranoid about Iran
because he has reasons to be. Since 2001 it has been obvious to any external
objective observer that the USA and Iran have enemies in common: Iran was
the only country to fight the Taliban before 2001 and Iran was the country
that fought a long and bloody war against Saddam Hussein in the 1980s.
When the USA attacked those two, the USA was simply following in the footsteps
of Iran. No wonder therefore that Iran became the main beneficiary of George
W Bush's wars. Bush removed Iran's most dangerous neighbor (Saddam Hussein)
and Iran's most serious long-term threat (the Taliban, another Sunni fanatical
movement that views Shiites as mortal enemies).
When ISIS took over most of Syria and a piece of Iraq, the first country to
send soldiers was Iran. Iran fought ISIS for real, while US allies like
Turkey and Saudi Arabia helped ISIS with money and weapons.
No wonder that eventually
Iran, under a new president, decided to sit down with the USA and try to
negotiate some kind of agreement about its nuclear program.
Netanyahu might be honestly worried about Iran's nuclear program (and of course
he avoids mentioning that Iran must be worried about Israel's much more
advanced nuclear program) but he is probably also worried about the possibility
that the USA and Iran become buddies again. Before the revolution that ousted
the shah and installed the current Shiite theocracy, Iran was the USA's most
reliable ally in the region. When Iran fell, Israel took its place.
Israel has made a fortune out of that Shiite revolution in Iran.
(See How Israel was born and became a power).
It must have been alarming for Netanyahu to know that Iraq was about to have free democratic elections. Netanyahu knows well the danger of letting the Arabs vote. Israel is painfully aware that the three major parties are all close to Iran. Just like Israel never recognized the elections in Gaza (won fair and square by Hamas), Israel has no intention of accepting the results of the elections in Iraq (or, for that matter, anywhere else). The Iraqis voted and, sure enough, former militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr won, beating both the party of militia leader Hadi al-Amiri and the party of Iraq's prime minister Haidar al-Abadi.
Iran's influence on Iraq is likely to increase.
Alas, Israel was much happier having ISIS behead thousands of innocents than
having Iran defeat ISIS and expand its influence on the region.
There were others, besides Israel, who were plotting to install a president
willing to attack Iran.
In August 2016 Donald Trump's son Donald Jr met at Trump Tower with
George Nader, an intermediary representing Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates with a plan to destabilize Iran, and with
Joel Zamel, an Israeli hacker specializing in social-media campaigns with a multimillion-dollar plan to help elect Trump. Nader eventually paid for Zamel's pro-Trump social-media campaign.
(See this New York Times article).
It doesn't take a conspiracy theory to figure out what happened: Trump promised
to destabilize Iran in return for help to get elected.
There are also other reasons for why Trump decided to kill the Iranian nuclear deal now.
One simple reason is precisely because of peace with North Korea. It is no coincidence that the decision to pull out of the Iranian deal came right after North Korea signaled the intention to make peace with the USA.
The USA's foreign policy is driven by the military industrial complex (read: Lockheed, Boeing, etc).
The military industrial complex is terrified that peace with North Korea would dry up contracts for new expensive military equipment. From the Vietnam war to the Iraqi war, the USA has fought all of its wars as business opportunities for these cynical firms. They need wars in order to manufacture their expensive missiles and bombers. If the North Korean crisis is ending, they desperately need a new crisis.
A more complex reason lies in Trump's ties with Russia
(see Where we stand with the Trump-Russia investigation).
Trump's focus on Iran is odd given that that Russia is not complying with a more important nuclear treaty: Russia has deployed nuclear-tipped cruise missiles in violation of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty. Trump's crusade against Iran, a country that has complied with its nuclear deal, distracts the public from the fact that Russia is not complying with a more important nuclear deal (Iran cannot strike the USA, Russia can).
Canceling the nuclear deal with Iran also contributes to the US split with powerful and important allies (Britain, Germany, France, etc) that Russia loves to exploit. It is unlikely that the European Union, India and China will
reimpose sanctions on Iran given that Iran has not violated the agreement.
China is now Iran's largest trading partner. Its trade with Iran jumped 30% in the first six months of 2017. China has extended credits to Iran totaling some $35 billion.
Trump's renewal of sanctions on Iran will create new tensions with all of these
countries, thereby further isolating the USA.
Meanwhile, Russia will reap the benefits of the certain spike in oil prices:
oil is Russia's main export, and any political crisis in the Middle East is
likely to send prices surging, thereby making Russia richer.
The Business Insider estimates that Russia's revenues from oil could
reach $44 billion.
Trump has just engineered a new economic boom in Russia.
TM, ®, Text copyright © 2018 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (april 2018)
How the USA spends your tax money.
April is tax season in the USA, so it is worth reminding US taxpayers why
the government needs their money.
The USA spends more on its military than the next seven seven nations combined,
including Russia and China. If one calculates all the money spent by the USA on
its military since the start of the endless Afghanistan war, the USA has spent
more than half a trillion dollars each and every year on its military.
Yes, that's "trillion": more than the entire GPD of most countries of the world.
Trump has just signed an increase in military spending that will bring the
yearly expenditure to $756 billion (not my opinion, but Trump's own number).
This can only happen if: a) the USA spends less on its own infrastructure
(forget the high-speed trains of Asia and Europe, and forget the free health
care of Scandinavia and Canada), or b) the USA increases taxes, one way or
another (e.g. by eliminating the various deductions, including the popular
mortgage deduction), or c) the USA borrows even more money than today from
countries like China (which would make it even harder to accuse them of
"unfair trade" when in fact they keep the USA from going bankrupt).
Some may think that this money is well spent because it protects US citizens.
Certainly not abroad. The list of countries where US citizens better not travel
is increasing every year, and it now includes pretty much every Islamic
country. US citizens and businesses abroad are routinely protected by
armies of security guards because the number of "terrorists" who would love
to blow them up is increasing by the day. The time may come when Europe, China,
and countless developing countries will tire of assigning security guards to
every US business and tour group, not to mention restaurants and hotels that
cater to US citizens.
That's what your money has achieved in the 25 years since the end of the Cold War.
Your tax money has also helped the USA prop up the totalitarian Islamic regime of Saudi Arabia, a nation that still considers women as inferior humans, as well as Israel, a nation that has repeatedly violated international law and relies on
US weapons to keep violating it.
Admittedly, your tax money has also helped to defend Japan, Taiwan and South Korea against China and North Korea, although it is not clear how you benefit from
that fact.
Meanwhile, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and China have become much modern
countries than the USA. When you travel to these Asian countries, or, for
that matter, to northern Europe, you feel like you landed on another planet.
The world knows this because their tourists frequently travel to the USA and
return home puzzled by how far behind the USA has fallen. Now they also begin
to worry that the country with the largest number of nuclear weapons and the
largest military budget in the world is rapidly becoming one of the most backwards with one of the least educated publics, which doesn't sound like a recipe
for peace and prosperity.
TM, ®, Text copyright © 2018 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (march 2018)
The #neveragain Movement Misses the Point
A big crowd convened on Washington for the "March For Our Lives" event.
Those are mostly young people protesting against a political class that
ignores their most fundamental right: the right to live.
The political class, bribed by the NRA, is de facto an accomplice to the
massacre of tens of thousands of US citizens, something that no terrorist
organization can even dream of.
The problem with this march and with the whole #neveragain movement is that
it misses the point.
Were the USA a democratic country, there wouldn't need to be any such march.
The thing to protest against is not that the NRA is free to terrorize the
nation (and its children in particular). The thing to protest again is that
the people are not represented properly in Congress and especially in the
White House. The president of the USA is a man who lost the election by
three million votes. There is no other country where the person who loses
the election becomes president.
The mother of all problems is the "electoral college", the silly way in
which the USA picks its leader.
Two of the last three presidents were elected despite the fact that they
lost the election. Both got a tiny minority of the votes of young people.
Both will die soon but after shaping the world that young people will have to live in for several more decades.
Remove the silly rule that the president is elected by a weird technicality,
make the USA a truly democratic (and great) nation, and then no gun-loving politician would ever be elected, because the majority of the country is in favor
of gun control.
The anger that drives these young people (potential future victims of the NRA)
will NOT translate into a wave of change in Congress. The reason is very
simple: after in 2010 the Tea Party (the radical right-wing gun fanatics of the
Republican Party) won several seats in Congress, they quickly proceeded to
redraw the borders of electoral districts so that one of them would always
win (a tactic eerily reminiscent of how Putin in Russia and others made
sure to win elections forever once they won one). That was
Chris Jankowski's RedMap (Registricting Majority Project) project.
The latest poll
(see it here) shows that
Democrats will win about 9% more votes than Republicans, but that means
virtually nothing: gerrymandering guarantees that the same defeated
gun-friendly politicians (mostly Republicans) will remain in power.
Wake up: your vote literally doesn't count, and that's why they don't care
about your marches (and your life).
The other undemocratic rule that favors your enemies is the rule that each state
has two senators, regardless of population. There are
two senators for California (population 36 million) and two for Alabama (population 5 million): California has 7 times the population of Alabama, which means
that someone from California (which includes Stanford, UC Berkeley, CalTech, UCLA, lots of Nobel Prize winners, plus Google, Apple, Facebook, Intel, and the whole of Silicon Valley) is 7 times less represented in the Senate than someone
from Alabama (which includes... hmmm i can't come up with any major university,
high-tech company or even news media... does Alabama contribute anything at
all to the future of humankind other than obesity-causing drinks?).
[Yes, i know, politically incorrect joke: but being politically correct all the time ends up causes the death of thousands of people a year, especially in states like Alabama, so it's about time to tell things as they are, especially in states like Alabama,].
Give California (and New York and Illinois and Boston and Washington DC and Philadelphia and Houston) equal voice as Alabama (and as Rhode Island and as Connecticut) in the senate (e.g., California gets 7 times more senators than Alabama) and most likely the senate will have the votes to change the constitution and remove the unlimited right to bear guns (and to improve many other things that are currently gridlocked in this most undemocratic congress).
Finally, there's a 2010 decision by the Supreme Court, ironically called
"Citizens United", that recognized corporations as "persons", thus opening the
doors for all sorts of dark money to influence politics.
Your vote doesn't count. And that's the real problem. No politician will listen
to what you are saying as long as your vote doesn't count.
Murder rates by state:
TM, ®, Text copyright © 2018 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (march 2018)
The Trump Scandals moved here.
- (march 2018)
The Trump Wars.
George W Bush, who became president despite losing the November 2000 elections,
ended up starting two wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, that, more than a decade later, are still raging and killing innocents at a total cost to the USA of
$3 trillion (according to estimates calculated by the economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes) and to Iraq and Afghanistan of untold billions of dollars.
Now another president who was not elected democratically, "Vladimir" Trump,
threatens to start not one but multiple wars.
Firstly, Trump wants to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal that was signed by Obama to stop Iran from building a nuclear weapon. The other countries signing the
deal were Britain, Germany, France, Russia and China.
It is unlikely that Iran will accept to renounce nuclear weapons in return of
nothing. It will probably resume its nuclear program. This will trigger an
escalation of tension with Israel (that considers Iran its main enemy) and
Saudi Arabia (ditto). Both will try to stop Iran with force. The USA will be
drawn into the conflict, one way or another.
Britain, France and Germany are strong supporters of the original deal, and
for a simple reason: so far it has worked. They are unlikely to side with the
USA in a war against Iran. The USA will be even more lonely than it was in the
(lost) war against Iraq.
Secondly, Trump has naively accepted an invitation to meet North Korea's dictator Kim Jong-un, a 34-year-old inexperience leader who wasn't even respected in his own country (until he assassinated his uncle and his half-brother) but who can now boast to have established North Korea as one of
the powers of the world, a peer of the USA.
So far Kim Jong-un got everything he wanted.
See The North Korean Crisis: A Tale of Two Madmen (or just one?) .
Unlike the irrational and impulsive Trump, Kim has proven to rational and calm:
one step at a time, he has turned the tables on both the USA and China, and now
can blackmail both.
If Trump thinks that Kim will ever accept to destroy his nuclear weapons, he
is even more incompetent than we thought.
The whole world, not only Kim, has learned the lesson of what happens to dictators who surrender their weapons of mass destruction: Saddam Hussein did it, and he is dead; Qaddafi did it, and he is dead.
Trump is going to be humiliated one way or another: either Kim declines to meet
with him, or Kim meets with him and then does nothing of what Trump demands.
Either way Trump will have only one way to save his face: bomb North Korea and
start a war.
Thirdly, Trump just started a trade war with China, which in itself could be more dangerous than military wars. China is the world's second economy and soon to be the first one. China has built economic alliances that extend from Latin America to Europe and from Africa to Russia at the same time that Trump killed
the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which would have been the biggest economic alliance in history.
For about 70 years the USA has been the world leader in free trade.
In fact, it is routinely assumed that the USA forced free trade on the rest
of the world: the World Bank, the IMF, etc were all US inventions, that the
rest of the world was forced to accept in order to trade with the USA.
If the USA, of all countries, reneges on free trade and starts a trade war
with China and anyone else, it will have few allies.
Trump has been successful in depicting the USA as an importer of goods.
The truth is very different. Here are the leading exporters in the world:
1. China 2,098 billion dollars;
2. United States 1,454 billion dollars;
3. Germany 1,339 billion dollars.
A trade war is risking the jobs of all the people producing those 1.454 billion dollars of "American" goods, and will cost dearly to all the consumers who buy
goods made abroad.
Trump tweeted: "Trade wars are good, and easy to win". That's true for his
personal business: real estate, casinos, golf courses and so on are not affected as much as the household goods that the middle class buys.
Finally, there's the rest of the world. Kori Schake, who worked for George W Bush, wrote: "I worry that President Trump could lead to war on the Korean Peninsula or against Iran, or by miscalculation in a number of other places where adversaries misread his intent. The president considers his unpredictability advantageous, when it is more likely to have explosive consequences."
But don't blame only Trump and his mouthpiece Fox News. A poll by the Pew Center http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/03/19/iraq-war-continues-to-divide-u-s-public-15-years-after-it-began/ 43% of US citizens still think that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a good idea. These are very likely to side with Trump on any war against North Korea, Iran, China and any other imaginary enemy as long as Fox News demonizes it.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2018 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (february 2018)
Congratulations NRA on another well-executed massacre.
See the 2012 article Congratulations NRA: another successful massacre! and its 2015 revision
Congratulations NRA on another well-executed massacre
and especially The end of the USA ,
but also
What is wrong with White Anglosaxon Christians?
- (january 2018)
Trump vs Kim
- (january 2018)
One year into the Trump-Russia collusion scandal,
Russia has benefited enormously from the decisions made by Trump.
Coincidence or not, in November 2017 Russia, Turkey and Iran agreed on a conference to decide the borders of postwar Syria, and in December 2017 Egypt granted Russia the right to use its airbases; two events that Trump tacitly approved and that marked the replacement of the USA with Russia as the main power broker in the Middle East. Trump also recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, so that the USA can no longer play a role in the peace process, another gift to Russia. This move has brought condemnation on the USA by all traditional allies in the region, including British prime minister Theresa May, German chancellor Angela Merkel and French president Emmanuel Macron... but not from Russia's president Putin: the USA is now as isolated as Hitler's Germany was in 1939. Thomas Friedman has written: "In nearly 30 years of covering United States foreign policy, I've never seen a president give up so much to so many for so little, starting with China and Israel." And that's on top of killing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free-trade deal, that would have created a 12-nation economic bloc controlling 40% of the world economy led by the USA. No US president has ever given Russia so many gifts. Russia comes out of Trump's first year in office as a world power with much more leverage than the USA, which is now a marginalized regional power. A German minister said that Germany is now more worried about the USA than North Korea...
Trump's circle has repeatedly attacked the research firm Fusion GPS that prepared the famous "Steele dossier", the dossier that details the collusion between Trump and Putin, a dossier in which so far nobody has found anything false and, in fact, many of its assertions are now proven to be true. Christopher Steele, a well-respected former British secret agent, has never discussed it with the media. Fusion GPS finally responded to Trump's attacks in a New York Times article. We now learn that the FBI already knew of collusions before Fusion GPS provided them with the Steele dossier. I feel vindicated: Fusion suggests that investigators should look into "the bank records of Deutsche Bank and others that were funding Mr. Trump's businesses". See my lengthy investigation: What's in "Vladimir" Trump's tax returns? where i said the same things one year ago. Quote: "We told Congress that from Manhattan to Sunny Isles Beach, Fla., and from Toronto to Panama, we found widespread evidence that Mr. Trump and his organization had worked with a wide array of dubious Russians in arrangements that often raised questions about money laundering.". And then concludes with the obvious question that Trump never answered: "Why did Mr. Trump repeatedly seek to do deals in a notoriously corrupt police state that most serious investors shun?"
See my full report here.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2018 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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