Stephan: No matter who wins the presidency, Trump or Biden, one thing is clear and irrefutable. A large segment of the White American population is racist, increasingly pro-authoritarian, anti-democratic, and uninterested in having an ethical government of integrity. If that sounds harsh swallow it anyway because the facts of the vote are the reality. And what that is also telling us is that we are a society scarily close to degenerating into violence and collapse
Image by Kenji Aoki/ The New York Times
When I first spoke with Joseph Tainter in early May, he and I and nearly everyone else had reason to be worried. A few days earlier, the official tally of Covid-19 infections in the United States had climbed above one million, unemployment claims had topped 30 million and the United Nations had warned that the planet was facing “multiple famines of biblical proportions.” George Floyd was still alive, and the protests spurred by his killing had not yet swept the nation, but a different kind of protest, led by white men armed with heavy weaponry, had taken over the Michigan State Legislature building. The president of the United States had appeared to suggest treating the coronavirus with disinfectant injections. Utah, where Tainter lives — he teaches at Utah State — was reopening its gyms, restaurants and hair salons that very day.
The chaos was considerable, but Tainter seemed calm. He walked me through the arguments of the book that made his reputation, “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” which has for […]
Stephan: This is the view of America and the election from the most prestigious English language newspaper in Europe. What it makes clear is that those who used to be considered America's allies, today see us as a savagely diminished nation, a country more to be pitied than admired. What happened? Because, as I said in my comment about the previous report, the world sees that a large percentage of our White population are uninterested in climate change or democracy, and happy to support a grossly corrupt and dishonest man for president as long as he supports male dominance, christofascism, and White supremacy.
Demonstrators gather in front of the White House on election day in Washington DC. Credit: Olivier Douliery/AFP/Getty
Whoever wins this year’s election, America remains a country bitterly and evenly divided. It has been more than three decades since the last presidential landslide. Despite polls suggesting that Donald Trump was poised to suffer a sweeping rejection by the voters, there was no repudiation of the president. Rather, just a fraction of the popular vote separates Joe Biden and Mr Trump.
Our view was that Mr Trump deserved to lose and in a big way. His mismanagement of the coronavirus crisis, which cost hundreds of thousands of American lives, was cause enough. But there were numerous reasons for Mr Trump’s ejection from the White House, given he ran the worst administration in modern US history.
It is small comfort that Americans understood the threat that Mr Trump represented and turned out in record numbers to vote against him. Yet, as this election depressingly revealed, there was an almost equal and opposite reaction from Mr Trump’s base. The president’s appeal, it seems, has only widened and deepened since he took […]
Heather Gillers and Gunjan Banerji, - The Wall Street Journal
Stephan: This, I think, is a major alarm bell about the economy no matter who wins the presidency.
Connecticut acted fast. Social distancing, lockdowns and testing slashed Covid-19 cases in the spring.
But when Comptroller Kevin Lembo opened an email from his budget director on April 15, it was clear the state’s quick action to contain the pandemic hadn’t insulated its finances.
“We hit the brakes so quickly on the economy that we went through the windshield,” his deputy wrote.WHAT’S NEWSU.S. States Face Historic Cash Crisis00:001xSUBSCRIBE
Connecticut is projecting a total revenue decline of $8.4 billion through the 2024 budget year—more than twice the rainy day fund built up over the past three years.
“All you can do is grip the bar as tight as you can, make the smartest decisions you can in real time, plan for the worst and be surprised at something less than worst,” said Mr. Lembo.
Nationwide, the U.S. state budget shortfall from 2020 through 2022 could amount to about $434 billion, according to data from Moody’s Analytics, the economic analysis arm of Moody’s Corp. The estimates assume no additional fiscal […]
Stephan: This has been talked about for weeks now, so it can not be considered a surprise. I take the vote for Trump as a statement by a large percentage of Americans that they don't care about climate change, because they voted for the man who has done this. All the effects of this withdrawal, I think, will be negative at many levels. America is passing off the world stage as the international leader.
Call it the long goodbye from the Paris climate agreement.
Driving the news: President Trump’s 2017 announcement withdrawing America from the 2015 accord becomes official at midnight Wednesday after a prolonged process required by the United Nations. It’s a chaotic coincidence that it comes the day after Election Day.
Where it stands: The outcome of the presidential election was unclear as of midnight. If Joe Biden wins the White House, he has vowed to return to the deal.
Trump’s official exit from the deal would be fleeting, but America’s retreat on climate change over the last four years would linger and be laborious to reverse.
The intrigue: Wednesday’s news is anticlimactic from the administration’s perspective. In Trump’s mind, he exited the deal the day he announced his intention to do so in June 2017, according to Axios’ Jonathan Swan.
A White House spokesperson declined to comment and referred Axios to the State Department, which has authority over global deals. The department is also not expected to mark the exit in any official way.
Stephan: I don't think it can be disputed that America is an increasingly fascist racist nation. It makes me very sad to write that sentence but the voting results demand it be seen as the truth.
TrumpersCredit: MOAR
Financier and philanthropist George Soros must have seen Trump coming as early as 2011. He certainly saw where a disturbingly large proportion of American voters were going. “The United States has been a democracy and open society since its founding. The idea that it will cease to be one seems preposterous; yet it is a very likely prospect,” he wrote in the New York Review of Books in June of that year.
George W. Bush’s reelection in 2004 had convinced Soros “that the malaise in American society went deeper than incompetent leadership.” The public had proved “unwilling to face harsh reality and was positively asking to be deceived by demanding easy answers to difficult problems.”LISTEN: Mark Cuban Joins The New Raw Story Podcast!
Will the American public now reconfirm Soros’ observation? This year’s campaign has given us plenty or reasons to worry.
By the end of Bush’s second term in 2009, few Americans denied the harsh realities of the Iraq war fiasco and of failed federal responses to Hurricane Katrina’s devastation and […]
