USA - Poll: Americans More Pessimistic About Economic Future

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 47% of American Adults say the economy will be weaker a year from now, while just 29% say the economy will be stronger. Fifteen percent (15%) expect the economy will be about the same a year from now. That’s a significant decline in economic confidence from March 2017, when 40% expected a stronger economy.

Read more at: Americans More Pessimistic About Economic Future - Rasmussen Reports®

USA - Poll: : 60% of Voters Say America Is More Divided

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 60% of Likely U.S. Voters say the country has become more divided since last year’s election. Only 13% think the country is more united than it was before the election, while 24% believe the level of division is about the same. Those numbers haven’t changed much since January.

Read more at: 60% of Voters Say America Is More Divided - Rasmussen Reports®

USA: Can America handle the truth about Trump? - by Alex Brandon

There isn't much that's glorious in the history of America holding the rich and powerful accountable for their sins.

But even in the context of its past failures of reckoning — over slavery, the invasion of Iraq, the global financial meltdown, et cetera — the country's hesitation to adjudicate the last president's role in the deadly insurrection on Capitol Hill last month seems egregiously self-destructive.

Nevertheless, most Republicans, and even some of Donald Trump's most ferocious critics, have recommended just letting it go.

Read more at: Can America handle the truth about Trump? | CBC News

USA: Is a Divided, Confused US the Perfect Scenario for Donald Trump's Coup d'Etat?

President Donald Trump’s stealthy, creeping ‘coup attempt’ remains a major political issue as we enter the final stretch of his presidency. He has successfully carried out his threat to contest by any means available to him the election defeat of November 2020, including legal action, political pressure, encouragement of mass protest by the extreme Right, not to mention threats of violence against election officials, including Republicans.

Trump is now calling for the US Senate and House to challenge the Electoral College vote on January 6, and his supporters to ‘march on Washington DC’, which could descend into violence. In addition, the administration is ramping up baseless fears of ‘retaliatory’ attacks by Iranian forces to mark the January 3 anniversary of the drone killing of General Suleimani, and reinforcing US naval, air and military forces in the Gulf.

Senior uniformed military worry that Trump will engineer a foreign military adventure as we approach the January 3 anniversary of US drone killing of Iran General Suleimani and Iraqi militia leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. Trump has also stated a desire to attack Iran for rocket attacks on the US embassy in Baghdad. Either could be a basis for mobilising the US military, declaring a national emergency and refusing to leave office: this has been discussed in such overt terms in a series of respected media including the Washington Post, Newsweek, The Hill and CNN. Trump’s coup attempt has also been called out in such terms by leading scholars, including the historian of authoritarianism, Professor Timothy Snyder at Yale University.

Read more at: Is a Divided, Confused US the Perfect Scenario for Donald Trump's Coup d'Etat?

USA - A Nation Divided: The Republican Revolt Against COVID Science and Common Sense - by Jonathan Chait

Last October, the Nuclear Threat Initiative and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security compiled a ranking system to assess the preparedness of 195 countries for the next global pandemic. Twenty-one panel experts across the globe graded each country in 34 categories composed of 140 subindices. At the top of the rankings, peering down at 194 countries supposedly less equipped to withstand a pandemic, stood the United States of America.

It has since become horrifyingly clear that the experts missed something. The supposed world leader is in fact a viral petri dish of uncontained infection. By June, after most of the world had beaten back the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S., with 4 percent of the world’s population, accounted for 25 percent of its cases. Florida alone was seeing more new infections a week than China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Australia, and the European Union combined.

During its long period of decline, the Ottoman Empire was called “the sick man of Europe.” The United States is now the sick man of the world, pitied by the same countries that once envied its pandemic preparedness — and, as recently as the 2014 Ebola outbreak, relied on its expertise to organize the global response.

Our former peer nations are now operating in a political context Americans would find unfathomable. Every other wealthy nation in the world has successfully beaten back the disease, at least significantly, and at least for now. New Zealand’s health minister was forced to resign after allowing two people who had tested positive for COVID-19 to attend a funeral. The Italian Parliament heckled Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte when he briefly attempted to remove his mask to deliver a speech. In May — around the time Trump cheered demonstrators into the streets to protest stay-at-home orders — Boris Johnson’s top adviser set off a massive national scandal, complete with multiple calls for his resignation, because he’d been caught driving to visit his parents during lockdown. If a Trump official had done the same, would any newspaper even have bothered to publish the story?

It is difficult for us Americans to imagine living in a country where violations so trivial (by our standards) provoke such an uproar. And if you’re tempted to see for yourself what it looks like, too bad — the E.U. has banned U.S. travelers for health reasons.

The distrust and open dismissal of expertise and authority may seem uniquely contemporary — a phenomenon of the Trump era, or the rise of online misinformation. But the president and his party are the products of a decades-long war against the functioning of good government, a collapse of trust in experts and empiricism, and the spread of a kind of magical thinking that flourishes in a hothouse atmosphere that can seal out reality. While it’s not exactly shocking to see a Republican administration be destroyed by incompetent management — it happened to the last one, after all — the willfulness of it is still mind-boggling and has led to the unnecessary sickness and death of hundreds of thousands of people and the torpedoing of the reelection prospects of the president himself. Like Stalin’s purge of 30,000 Red Army members right before World War II, the central government has perversely chosen to disable the very asset that was intended to carry it through the crisis. Only this failure of leadership and management took place in a supposedly advanced democracy whose leadership succumbed to a debilitating and ultimately deadly ideological pathology.

For the compledt report click on this link:
The Republican Revolt Against COVID Science and Common Sense