americas

The spiteful petulance shown by President Trump this week in announcing the cutting off of U.S. funding to the World Health Organization casts a long shadow on his character and on bombastic claims of American leadership.
In the midst of a global pandemic, Trump has decided to pull the plug on U.S. financial support for the United Nations’ health body. At $400 million a year – 15 per cent of its total budget – the U.S. represents the biggest funder of the WHO. Kudos to the U.S. for its erstwhile support.

The coronavirus pandemic has started to have another profound effect: The political leadership of the world is being transformed. No world leaders have as yet been actually killed by the virus. But several have been incapacitated, one major leader appears already to have been toppled with a second under sudden threat while the policies and world views of several others have been turned upside down and inside out.

After decades of being spoken about historically in terms of the Cuban Revolution and ideological anti-imperialism, the coronavirus pandemic has thrust Cuba onto the international arena and as a formidable opponent to capitalism. While Western countries struggle to cope with increasingly failing healthcare systems that account for a high death rate among coronavirus patients, Cuba is managing the situation at home while also maintaining its internationalist outreach. No longer isolated, Cuba and its doctors are very much in demand by the same governments that pander to U.S.

It is perhaps inevitable that a major health panic like the coronavirus will have political ramifications based on whether those most affected by the illness will perceive that the government performed well or poorly in the crisis. The government for its part will engage in a blame game which seeks to place responsibility for what did not go well on an outside party.

The anti-science, conspiracy-driven, and radical right-wing agenda of the Trump administration has directly led to the needless deaths of tens of thousands of Americans and foreign citizens amid the worst pandemic to strike the world since the 1918 influenza scourge. Like any fascist tyrant, Trump requires scapegoats to maintain his power base and he has discovered plenty of them.

In the Soviet Union there was an expression “The Organs of State Security” or “Organs” for short. Their supposed power in the USSR was one of the things that separated them from what we used to call “the free world”. Not so much any more – the American Organs came very close to getting rid of the so-called Most Powerful Man in The World. They made only one mistake; they probably won’t next time.

A perception ‘gap’, so wide, you could sail a Cruise Liner through it. On the one hand, we have the looming spectre of recession; a major loss of jobs, and of earnings cratered (some 80% of the global workforce has seen their workplaces closed, or partly closed, as a result of the virus crisis), and on the other hand, the shocking non-sequitur of the U.S.

Despite its charter proclaiming mutual defense and security, the NATO military alliance is showing a rather unbecoming dog-eat-dog individualistic reaction in coping with the coronavirus pandemic.
The United States, the top dog in the 30-member pack of nations, is accused of “modern piracy” after it nabbed consignments of face masks which were bound for allies Canada, France and Germany to help those nations fight against soaring epidemics of the disease.

Major patterns of the global coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic are now all too clear: But the patterns that have emerged are never discussed in the 24/7 American Mainstream Media (MSM) and its European liberal wannabe cheerleaders led by the always ineffable BBC in Britain.
The right-wing old Reagan imperialists and fundamentalists continue to endlessly proclaim that the crisis has mortally wounded China’s standing in the world; That is simply a lie.

Throughout the world in countries that elected right-wing anti-government libertarian leaders – from the United States and Brazil to the United Kingdom and Australia – incompetence and lack of preparedness for the Covid-19 pandemic will directly lead to hundreds of thousands of needless deaths. The political rhetoric of those leaders who practice “barbarian laissez-faire” policies have been exposed by Covid-19 as worthless pablum designed to enthrall their unthinking supporters.