In his single term as president, George H. W. Bush negotiated the peaceful reunification of Germany. He liberated Kuwait while losing few American lives. He signed legislation to end acid rain. He did a budget deal that reduced federal deficits, enacted the Americans With Disabilities Act, and successfully resolved the collapse of the savings-and-loan industry.
To say the least, Donald Trump is not a president in the league of Bush, Carter, or even Taft. Few presidents have left office with so little accomplished, impeached and disgraced. Trump took a lot of credit for the economic growth of his first three years, but the economy was already growing strongly when he took office. Pick a measure, almost any measure, and the trajectory of his first three years was identical to that of Barack Obama’s final three years: unemployment, manufacturing, wages, you name it. And whereas Obama passed a successful economy to Trump, Trump bequeaths a wreck to his successor.
Read more at:
The Things Trump Got Right - The Atlantic
Showing posts with label Disater. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Disater. Show all posts
5/9/20
USA - A failed State: he Coronavirus Revealed America’s Failures - by George Packer
When the virus came here, it found a
country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them
ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic
bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had
gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with
the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose
their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in
the high-risk category.
The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering. The administration squandered two irretrievable months to prepare. From the president came willful blindness, scapegoating, boasts, and lies. From his mouthpieces, conspiracy theories and miracle cures. A few senators and corporate executives acted quickly—not to prevent the coming disaster, but to profit from it. When a government doctor tried to warn the public of the danger, the White House took the mic and politicized the message.
Every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state. With no national plan—no coherent instructions at all—families, schools, and offices were left to decide on their own whether to shut down and take shelter. When test kits, masks, gowns, and ventilators were found to be in desperately short supply, governors pleaded for them from the White House, which stalled, then called on private enterprise, which couldn’t deliver. States and cities were forced into bidding wars that left them prey to price gouging and corporate profiteering. Civilians took out their sewing machines to try to keep ill-equipped hospital workers healthy and their patients alive. Russia, Taiwan, and the United Nations sent humanitarian aid to the world’s richest power—a beggar nation in utter chaos.
Donald Trump saw the crisis almost entirely in personal and political terms. Fearing for his reelection, he declared the coronavirus pandemic a war, and himself a wartime president. But the leader he brings to mind is Marshal Philippe Pétain, the French general who, in 1940, signed an armistice with Germany after its rout of French defenses, then formed the pro-Nazi Vichy regime. Like Pétain, Trump collaborated with the invader and abandoned his country to a prolonged disaster. And, like France in 1940, America in 2020 has stunned itself with a collapse that’s larger and deeper than one miserable leader. Some future autopsy of the pandemic might be called Strange Defeat, after the historian and Resistance fighter Marc Bloch’s contemporaneous study of the fall of France. Despite countless examples around the U.S. of individual courage and sacrifice, the failure is national. And it should force a question that most Americans have never had to ask: Do we trust our leaders and one another enough to summon a collective response to a mortal threat? Are we still capable of self-government?
This is the third major crisis of the short 21st century. The first, on September 11, 2001, came when Americans were still living mentally in the previous century, and the memory of depression, world war, and cold war remained strong. On that day, people in the rural heartland did not see New York as an alien stew of immigrants and liberals that deserved its fate, but as a great American city that had taken a hit for the whole country. Firefighters from Indiana drove 800 miles to help the rescue effort at Ground Zero. Our civic reflex was to mourn and mobilize together.
Partisan politics and terrible policies, especially the Iraq War, erased the sense of national unity and fed a bitterness toward the political class that never really faded. The second crisis, in 2008, intensified it. At the top, the financial crash could almost be considered a success. Congress passed a bipartisan bailout bill that saved the financial system. Outgoing Bush-administration officials cooperated with incoming Obama administration officials. The experts at the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department used monetary and fiscal policy to prevent a second Great Depression. Leading bankers were shamed but not prosecuted; most of them kept their fortunes and some their jobs. Before long they were back in business. A Wall Street trader told me that the financial crisis had been a “speed bump.”
All of the lasting pain was felt in the middle and at the bottom, by Americans who had taken on debt and lost their jobs, homes, and retirement savings. Many of them never recovered, and young people who came of age in the Great Recession are doomed to be poorer than their parents. Inequality—the fundamental, relentless force in American life since the late 1970s—grew worse.
he purest embodiment of political nihilism is not Trump himself but his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner. In his short lifetime, Kushner has been fraudulently promoted as both a meritocrat and a populist. He was born into a moneyed real-estate family the month Ronald Reagan entered the Oval Office, in 1981—a princeling of the second Gilded Age. Despite Jared’s mediocre academic record, he was admitted to Harvard after his father, Charles, pledged a $2.5 million donation to the university. Father helped son with $10 million in loans for a start in the family business, then Jared continued his elite education at the law and business schools of NYU, where his father had contributed $3 million. Jared repaid his father’s support with fierce loyalty when Charles was sentenced to two years in federal prison in he purest embodiment of political nihilism is not Trump himself but his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner. In his short lifetime, Kushner has been fraudulently promoted as both a meritocrat and a populist. He was born into a moneyed real-estate family the month Ronald Reagan entered the Oval Office, in 1981—a princeling of the second Gilded Age. Despite Jared’s mediocre academic record, he was admitted to Harvard after his father, Charles, pledged a $2.5 million donation to the university. Father helped son with $10 million in loans for a start in the family business, then Jared continued his elite education at the law and business schools of NYU, where his father had contributed $3 million. Jared repaid his father’s support with fierce loyalty when Charles was sentenced to two years in federal prison in 2005 for trying to resolve a family legal quarrel by entrapping his sister’s husband with a prostitute and videotaping the encounter.
We’re faced with a choice that the crisis makes inescapably clear. We can stay hunkered down in self-isolation, fearing and shunning one another, letting our common bond wear away to nothing. Or we can use this pause in our normal lives to pay attention to the hospital workers holding up cellphones so their patients can say goodbye to loved ones; the planeload of medical workers flying from Atlanta to help in New York; the aerospace workers in Massachusetts demanding that their factory be converted to ventilator production; the Floridians standing in long lines because they couldn’t get through by phone to the skeletal unemployment office; the residents of Milwaukee braving endless waits, hail, and contagion to vote in an election forced on them by partisan justices. We can learn from these dreadful days that stupidity and injustice are lethal; that, in a democracy, being a citizen is essential work; that the alternative to solidarity is death. After we’ve come out of hiding and taken off our masks, we should not forget what it was like to be alone.
Read the full report at: The Coronavirus Revealed America’s Failures - The Atlantic
The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering. The administration squandered two irretrievable months to prepare. From the president came willful blindness, scapegoating, boasts, and lies. From his mouthpieces, conspiracy theories and miracle cures. A few senators and corporate executives acted quickly—not to prevent the coming disaster, but to profit from it. When a government doctor tried to warn the public of the danger, the White House took the mic and politicized the message.
Every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state. With no national plan—no coherent instructions at all—families, schools, and offices were left to decide on their own whether to shut down and take shelter. When test kits, masks, gowns, and ventilators were found to be in desperately short supply, governors pleaded for them from the White House, which stalled, then called on private enterprise, which couldn’t deliver. States and cities were forced into bidding wars that left them prey to price gouging and corporate profiteering. Civilians took out their sewing machines to try to keep ill-equipped hospital workers healthy and their patients alive. Russia, Taiwan, and the United Nations sent humanitarian aid to the world’s richest power—a beggar nation in utter chaos.
Donald Trump saw the crisis almost entirely in personal and political terms. Fearing for his reelection, he declared the coronavirus pandemic a war, and himself a wartime president. But the leader he brings to mind is Marshal Philippe Pétain, the French general who, in 1940, signed an armistice with Germany after its rout of French defenses, then formed the pro-Nazi Vichy regime. Like Pétain, Trump collaborated with the invader and abandoned his country to a prolonged disaster. And, like France in 1940, America in 2020 has stunned itself with a collapse that’s larger and deeper than one miserable leader. Some future autopsy of the pandemic might be called Strange Defeat, after the historian and Resistance fighter Marc Bloch’s contemporaneous study of the fall of France. Despite countless examples around the U.S. of individual courage and sacrifice, the failure is national. And it should force a question that most Americans have never had to ask: Do we trust our leaders and one another enough to summon a collective response to a mortal threat? Are we still capable of self-government?
This is the third major crisis of the short 21st century. The first, on September 11, 2001, came when Americans were still living mentally in the previous century, and the memory of depression, world war, and cold war remained strong. On that day, people in the rural heartland did not see New York as an alien stew of immigrants and liberals that deserved its fate, but as a great American city that had taken a hit for the whole country. Firefighters from Indiana drove 800 miles to help the rescue effort at Ground Zero. Our civic reflex was to mourn and mobilize together.
Partisan politics and terrible policies, especially the Iraq War, erased the sense of national unity and fed a bitterness toward the political class that never really faded. The second crisis, in 2008, intensified it. At the top, the financial crash could almost be considered a success. Congress passed a bipartisan bailout bill that saved the financial system. Outgoing Bush-administration officials cooperated with incoming Obama administration officials. The experts at the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department used monetary and fiscal policy to prevent a second Great Depression. Leading bankers were shamed but not prosecuted; most of them kept their fortunes and some their jobs. Before long they were back in business. A Wall Street trader told me that the financial crisis had been a “speed bump.”
All of the lasting pain was felt in the middle and at the bottom, by Americans who had taken on debt and lost their jobs, homes, and retirement savings. Many of them never recovered, and young people who came of age in the Great Recession are doomed to be poorer than their parents. Inequality—the fundamental, relentless force in American life since the late 1970s—grew worse.
he purest embodiment of political nihilism is not Trump himself but his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner. In his short lifetime, Kushner has been fraudulently promoted as both a meritocrat and a populist. He was born into a moneyed real-estate family the month Ronald Reagan entered the Oval Office, in 1981—a princeling of the second Gilded Age. Despite Jared’s mediocre academic record, he was admitted to Harvard after his father, Charles, pledged a $2.5 million donation to the university. Father helped son with $10 million in loans for a start in the family business, then Jared continued his elite education at the law and business schools of NYU, where his father had contributed $3 million. Jared repaid his father’s support with fierce loyalty when Charles was sentenced to two years in federal prison in he purest embodiment of political nihilism is not Trump himself but his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner. In his short lifetime, Kushner has been fraudulently promoted as both a meritocrat and a populist. He was born into a moneyed real-estate family the month Ronald Reagan entered the Oval Office, in 1981—a princeling of the second Gilded Age. Despite Jared’s mediocre academic record, he was admitted to Harvard after his father, Charles, pledged a $2.5 million donation to the university. Father helped son with $10 million in loans for a start in the family business, then Jared continued his elite education at the law and business schools of NYU, where his father had contributed $3 million. Jared repaid his father’s support with fierce loyalty when Charles was sentenced to two years in federal prison in 2005 for trying to resolve a family legal quarrel by entrapping his sister’s husband with a prostitute and videotaping the encounter.
We’re faced with a choice that the crisis makes inescapably clear. We can stay hunkered down in self-isolation, fearing and shunning one another, letting our common bond wear away to nothing. Or we can use this pause in our normal lives to pay attention to the hospital workers holding up cellphones so their patients can say goodbye to loved ones; the planeload of medical workers flying from Atlanta to help in New York; the aerospace workers in Massachusetts demanding that their factory be converted to ventilator production; the Floridians standing in long lines because they couldn’t get through by phone to the skeletal unemployment office; the residents of Milwaukee braving endless waits, hail, and contagion to vote in an election forced on them by partisan justices. We can learn from these dreadful days that stupidity and injustice are lethal; that, in a democracy, being a citizen is essential work; that the alternative to solidarity is death. After we’ve come out of hiding and taken off our masks, we should not forget what it was like to be alone.
Read the full report at: The Coronavirus Revealed America’s Failures - The Atlantic
1/2/17
Global Trade - USA: Political Disaster in the making: Trump’s zero-sum worldview spells trouble for trade - by Lawrence Herman
 |
| Donald TRump: Political Disaster in the making |
The global trading system has been thrown into disarray with Donald Trump’s election and his clear disdain for international trade commitments – or, put another way, his stridently protectionist policies designed, he says, to make America great again.
This amounts to a decisive turnaround from the leadership role U.S. administrations have played since formulating the Bretton Woods agreements of 1947-48. Those American-led efforts produced the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and ultimately the WTO Agreement of 1994, with the United States leading and cajoling other governments to agree to an orderly international trading system based on widely, if not universally, respected rules.
Now, it seems, that leadership role is no longer in play, incompatible with Mr. Trump’s thumping on the campaign trail, slamming the TPP and NAFTA so often that it’s impossible to imagine that these positions won’t dominate the new policy agenda on U.S. trade.
In effect, we’ve gone from a reasonably secure international trading system with known signposts and respect for rules to largely unknown and uncharted territory. All of this in the span of a few weeks.
Some observers say, with some justification, that we still need to see where all that rhetoric about the TPP and NAFTA being a “disaster” is leading. Fair enough. Protectionist bombast in the hurly-burly of a presidential campaign may not translate into actual anti-free-trade policies once Mr. Trump takes office.
It’s true we still don’t know Mr. Trump’s real agenda or who will comprise his entire trade policy team, notably his choice of the new U.S. Trade Representative and other senior trade officials. We also have the Congress in the background, with its very important role in trade policy as a check to presidential excesses.
But the signals aren’t propitious. There’s not much likelihood of the Trump administration looking kindly on its trading partners, Canada included. The message to the world is that trade is a zero-sum game and that all deals have to be weighed purely in terms of what’s in it for the United States, full stop. Forget mutual concessions and balanced outcomes.
So while we await some policy direction from Washington, we should have no illusions. Canada-U.S. trade could be in for some stormy times. Our government has to prepare for all contingencies under the worst-case scenarios with NAFTA on the chopping block.
That means not only having Plan B well developed but also having plans C, D, E and F ready to roll out as events unfold.
What are the broad indicators as we await those events?
Even before Mr. Trump’s election, international trade has been under some stress, the WTO recently reporting an increase in protectionist measures worldwide.
In the negotiating arena, efforts under the WTO umbrella to achieve some modest advances in discrete fields after the collapse of the Doha Round have been making glacial progress and same have stalled, showing how fraught these processes have become.
On the more-contained regional front, the TPP was indeed successfully concluded, but Mr. Trump has put that deal into deep-freeze. Some hope remains that the inter-Asian trade and economic negotiations, led by China but without U.S. involvement, can achieve some traction, but progress is reportedly slow.
Given the difficulties in the multilateral arena and the slow pace in other regional trade deals, and with the U.S. retrenchment from leadership in advancing global rules, Canada and the rest of the world will have to adjust to this new reality.
The times really are a-changin’.
As others have written in this paper, Canada’s top challenge will be to maintain access to the U.S. market paid for under both the original free-trade agreement of 1988 and NAFTA. These were the result of balanced concessions during arduous negotiations. Canada gained that access by granting benefits to U.S. exporters and investors and by adjusting national policies, particularly in respect of guaranteeing the U.S. access to Canadian energy supplies.
An increase in U.S. protectionism, whatever form that takes, will inevitably mean a turn to bilateral trade arrangements as countries seek some cover from the loss of access to the U.S. market.
For Canada, this means injecting some effort into ongoing bilateral trade talks with Japan. Negotiations with China have been hinted at and the government may choose to add some steam to that file as well. There are also the stalled bilateral Canada-India negotiations that could be given a push.
Other countries will also see the need to solidify bilateral links as a hedge against reduced access to the U.S. market and an increase in U.S. protectionism, whatever form it takes.
This isn’t to suggest the sky is falling. Global business will continue through multiple supply chains and commercial arrangements.
However, once the Trump administration takes over, the established order of things will certainly be changed.
We’ll be in uncharted territory with the largest ship being captained by someone that doesn’t read or respect the rules of navigation.
Read more: Trump’s zero-sum worldview spells trouble for trade - The Globe and Mail
2/10/16
US Presidential Elections: United States: Primary Lunacy - by Beat Guldimann
With the Democratic and Republican primaries in full swing, the
spectacle on American TV screens could not be more entertaining, even
outrageous.
Democrats have a choice between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. She is the incarnation of the Clinton Dynasty, keen on creating an air of inevitability.
But she comes with a lot of baggage that makes her intrinsically unworthy of trust.
Sanders has long been regarded as an independent “socialist” (by American standards) dinosaur who just recently decided to re-join the Democratic Party to have a shot at the White House, very remote as that prospect always seemed.
However, his call to “start a new American revolution” has received a remarkably positive reaction in the Democratic electorate.
Republicans will most likely have to choose between Trump, Cruz and Rubio, now all frontrunners. Unlike the Democrats, it appears as if the Republicans have shed their “dynasty” issue, with “princeling” Jeb Bush completely missing his launch.
(That, of course, makes Hillary’s dynastic factor all the more problematic for Democrats. Their party certainly is supposed to be less stodgy than the Republicans.)
Trump is a pure populist who will do and say anything, without filter, that might get him his next trophy. He is a self-centered narcissist who believes he can buy the Presidency because he is “really, really rich” and comes up with completely outrageous ideas that will never see the light of day.
What is different this time is how many angry voters have decided to participate in the early stages of the U.S. election.
And they gravitate to both extremes: to Sanders in the Democratic and to Trump in the Republican camp. Their rhetoric is a telltale echo reflecting the void of the shattered American Dream.
Note EU-Digest: The huge win of both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in New Hampshire shows the US voter is totally fed-up with the political establishment, most, if not all, funded by Corporate Super Pacts, and an American economy where 1 percent of the population controls all the wealth. As crazy as this may sound - if the corporate supported political status quo is maintained, it could eventually lead to either a popular revolution, or God forbid, maybe even an unthinkable military take over. Anger of the US voter in both parties has unfortunately become the common denominator.
Read more: United States: Primary Lunacy - The Globalist
Democrats have a choice between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. She is the incarnation of the Clinton Dynasty, keen on creating an air of inevitability.
But she comes with a lot of baggage that makes her intrinsically unworthy of trust.
Sanders has long been regarded as an independent “socialist” (by American standards) dinosaur who just recently decided to re-join the Democratic Party to have a shot at the White House, very remote as that prospect always seemed.
However, his call to “start a new American revolution” has received a remarkably positive reaction in the Democratic electorate.
Republicans will most likely have to choose between Trump, Cruz and Rubio, now all frontrunners. Unlike the Democrats, it appears as if the Republicans have shed their “dynasty” issue, with “princeling” Jeb Bush completely missing his launch.
(That, of course, makes Hillary’s dynastic factor all the more problematic for Democrats. Their party certainly is supposed to be less stodgy than the Republicans.)
Trump is a pure populist who will do and say anything, without filter, that might get him his next trophy. He is a self-centered narcissist who believes he can buy the Presidency because he is “really, really rich” and comes up with completely outrageous ideas that will never see the light of day.
What is different this time is how many angry voters have decided to participate in the early stages of the U.S. election.
And they gravitate to both extremes: to Sanders in the Democratic and to Trump in the Republican camp. Their rhetoric is a telltale echo reflecting the void of the shattered American Dream.
Note EU-Digest: The huge win of both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in New Hampshire shows the US voter is totally fed-up with the political establishment, most, if not all, funded by Corporate Super Pacts, and an American economy where 1 percent of the population controls all the wealth. As crazy as this may sound - if the corporate supported political status quo is maintained, it could eventually lead to either a popular revolution, or God forbid, maybe even an unthinkable military take over. Anger of the US voter in both parties has unfortunately become the common denominator.
Read more: United States: Primary Lunacy - The Globalist
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