EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN YOUR DESTINATION NOW

 

“Donald Trump says coronavirus is an ATTACK on America worse than Pearl Harbor or 9/11 as the [American] death toll climbs to more than 74,000”

 

The world has two major crises – a pandemic and an economic collapse – plus many other serious ongoing problems, including wars and trade wars.

And at the very time of such great need for leadership, a demonstrated incompetent serves as the President of its most powerful country. A man who speaks only in dishonest terms, a man who refuses to cooperate with almost anyone, and a man seemingly bent on destruction.  Not just an incompetent, but a highly belligerent incompetent.

Trump’s efforts are going to make America anything but great again when all this is over.

A lot of old friends and allies – quite apart from those he needlessly calls enemies – are going to remember this ghastly performance which has included a savage lack of compassion for the sick – both at home and abroad – and America’s credibility and influence are going to be much reduced.

That will only magnify the effects of Trump’s previous clumsy, bludgeoning efforts to intimidate everyone into doing things America’s way. Well, it turns out, that in a crisis, America’s way is a disaster.

As well, we have his flash-fire intemperate readiness to tear-up important working international treaties and agreements, acts which only caution everyone about the value of obtaining America’s signature on an important document.

Trump’s America has the greatest number of coronavirus infections and deaths in the world, with a very great many more headed its way. America’s healthcare system, which knowledgeable people understood was poor and extremely unfair, has been put under spotlights for the world to see.

America has been shown not even able to marshal its own resources, as with medical supplies, an important area an unqualified, arrogant son-in-law was appointed to head.

America has been embarrassed by the firing of a very able Navy commander who was only looking after the health and welfare of his crew. At the same time, Trump pardoned another Navy man, one convicted of vicious murder abroad, a man some of whose past associates describe as sick, and even granted him a friendly White House chat.

But Trump is too wrapped up in himself to grasp the withering general impact of any of that. He is uncontrollably angry that the pandemic and its side-effects have interfered with his re-election, which he had earlier believed was pretty much “in the bag,” and which he regards as the world’s pivotally important event.

So, someone must be held responsible, and what better candidate for that role than China, a country he literally hates and has insulted many times over?

His obsession with China from the beginning has been to get it completely “de-coupled” from America. The world’s two most important economies “de-coupled,” and at a time of world disorder in finances, economics, and trade? He simply has no grasp of what he is doing, but he has astonishing depths of resentment and hate.

It’s a rather remarkable display seeing such incompetence and ignorance mated to insatiable drive and ego. But Nature is like that, often creating the most startling nightmare creatures as its long experiment with evolution proceeds, creatures much like the coronavirus itself.

I think it means that America’s relative decline in the world, already well underway and against which Trump has seen himself as heroically battling, can only be speeded-up, affected by perceptions of a President’s incoherent acts and words and the ensuing necessary heavy loss of confidence, in both America’s abilities and intentions.

Other countries, ones with far less resources, but endowed with generous cooperation and enlightened leaders, have simply done far better. How, after this, in any way can America be regarded as “indispensable” or “exceptional”? I think it cannot.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY PHILIP GIRALDI

 

“A Tale of Two Foreign Policies: The Train-Wreck Abroad Is Bipartisan”

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Response to a comment saying, “I’ll get you a real third party. We only have one anyway. The property party with two right wings. If our people can return their faith to the source of everything good in our lives, then the notion of the two artificially combating parties will disappear. It’s time to send them both home. And end the show in Washington”

Sorry, but that is dreaming in technicolor.

The fact is the US is pretty much a plutocracy now, and the two parties are heavily supported by that plutocracy.

You cannot even sit down at the card table without a huge stake.

It’s what we call in economics, a barrier to entry.

The many quasi-monopolies and duopolies we see in our economy work the same way, as with gigantic advertising budgets a newcomer cannot hope to match.

A few facts on America’s plutocracy.

The Supreme Court decision that “money is free speech.”

Hillary Clinton burned through 1.2 billion dollars in just one campaign for one person.

Mike Bloomberg spent about $900 million on his recent brief effort for the nomination.

In practical terms, there are no limits on political spending and donating.

And there are no real limits on the work of lobbies for private and special interests.

It has become a standing joke that America has “the best Congress money can buy.”

America’s Frankenstein military/security apparatus is not about defense, at all. It is about the maintenance of global empire. It burns through a trillion dollars a year, and it exists to serve America’s plutocracy and its establishment.

The American tax structure has become terribly bent. It is helping to generate huge disparities, the so-called “one percent”, and support plutocracy.

The main difference between the two parties is the Democrats talk about various domestic social measures.

In all other respects, the parties are identical – in support for the Pentagon/security establishment, support for global empire, and support for almost continuous wars and coups, and both depend on plutocracy for a flow of funds. Voters get no choice at all in such matters.

And the irony for the Democrats is that so long as America burns through a trillion dollars a year for supporting empire – money it doesn’t even have, all borrowed – none of the large social programs can possibly happen.

And who do you think ends up paying for all the interest on all that immense borrowing? It sure ain’t the plutocrats that its expenditure served.

America’s political system is pretty much a rigged game. There’s no serious chance of changing it either, although a catastrophe like we’re now headed into could do that. But they are already talking in Washington of suspending habeas corpus and about which Pentagon general might step in.

Tulsi Gabbard wasn’t even allowed to compete because she questions the wars.

Bernie Sanders has been cheated a second time. He really isn’t a socialist, he’s an FDR progressive. But his being cheated twice by elaborate measures is the perfect example of how risk-averse America’s establishment is.

It ain’t a pretty picture, and the reality always gives me a little chuckle when I read of American officials telling others abroad how they should do things.

By the way, that vast expenditure on empire also gets in the way of improving America’s infrastructure – from schools to bridges.

The genuine way to compete with China is not Trump’s noise and threats and tariffs, it is old-fashioned getting down to work and improving your competitiveness, but America’s establishment isn’t the least interested in doing that. It feels entitled to be number one in everything, and so it just demands it. It’s what Putin accurately describes as “a sense of entitlement.”

In the end, it will get America nowhere, except into trouble. The American Dream was the simple result of having been the last industrial power standing after WWII and having invested heavily for the war.

But those conditions and that era are gone, for good. Others have invested and worked hard, and they do many things better than America does.

After all, do we not see throughout our lives the rise and fall of great firms, of great families? It is no different with empire.

America has been declining in relative terms in the world economy for decades. It is just the way things work. You cannot bully your way back, either, like the big bully in the White House thinks you can.

Pursuing that course is almost certainly going lead to war, and I can’t imagine that any sane person wants that, but to call some leaders in Washington sane is seriously stretching truth.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY STEPHEN F. COHEN IN THE UNZ REVIEW

 

“How Impeachment Is Escalating the New US-Russian Cold War”

 

“Putin wants stability and partners.”

 

A truer statement could not be made.

What is remarkable is that so many prominent Americans could say the opposite.

Of course, if a powerful country is guided by blindness, the risks are clear and they are enormous.

Yet relatively few in America seem to care.

I depart from Cohen’s view that the leadership of Trump – combined with that of Putin – could make a difference. Despite a few early encouraging words about Russia, I just do not see where Trump has provided any leadership.

Putin is a remarkable statesman, but he is in no position to overcome an American establishment hell-bent on opposing every reasonable effort. That’s part of why so much of his attention has been turned toward Asia and the larger world.

Trump’s early encouraging words about Russia only provided a target for America’s Russo-phobia mania, a condition always present in gigantic, self-perpetuating, and scarcely-scrutinized bureaucracies like CIA and the FBI, but something also seized upon since the election by the Democratic Party both to explain its loss and to intimidate future voters.

Induced chaos is nothing new as a means used to gain power. The CIA uses it in virtually all of its coups abroad. So, it should come as no surprise that there are forces, privileged establishment interests, ready to employ the same approach inside the United States, so comfortable have they grown with it.

The trouble is that Trump is simply not a real leader. He is a bully towards opponents and towards the entire world in matters of trade and military policy, but that is not leadership. He himself represents just another form of chaos.

That is the United States’ real problem. It has no leadership, in either party or in the major “organs” of the state, only a pretty ugly class of people – corrupt, privileged, arrogant – who influence the direction of events and feel entitled to tell others how to run their affairs.

The situation very much reflects America’s general relative decline, much resembling that of a decayed once-great merchant family, as a new order in world affairs prepares to make its debut.

I tend to doubt the impeachment will succeed, despite my views that what Trump did very much is inappropriate and that impeachment in America is largely a political act.

But if that proves to be the case, it is no great mercy for the county or the world. It means four more years of a poor leader making great bellowing claims about nothing.

The Democrats, too, are bereft of real leadership in the candidates for the nomination. Some of them are almost ridiculous, much like figures in current popular culture, and none of those with any chance opposes imperial wars and hostility towards Russia.

However, the Democrats, in holding up the indictment (the articles of impeachment), are very much looking for added elements, as those likely to come from scrutiny of Trump’s financial and tax records, should access to them be gained. He is an unscrupulous man, and I have little doubt those records could provide rich veins of impeachment material.

They are likely also looking to other potential high-level insider witnesses to Trump’s shady methods, potential witnesses whom Trump dismissed at various points.

Well, even were the impeachment to succeed, the only gain would be an end to Trump’s glaring, half-lunatic faces and ugly-kid complaining and bellowing. There are no meaningful likely alternatives in the Democratic Party.

 

On Putin, readers may enjoy:

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2019/08/06/john-chuckman-comment-china-russia-and-the-united-states-in-the-21st-century-some-difficult-and-dangerous-times-ahead-as-the-world-now-rapidly-evolves-in-ways-america-rejects/

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2019/03/05/john-chuckman-comment-reflections-on-putin-as-a-leader-and-on-the-world-situation-in-which-he-works/