Category Archives: politics

May 24, 2018 · 1:05 pm

Fighting the Next Pandemic and Watching Trump

I must apologize for the long silence: I have been so busy writing for Impakter that I never got around to updating you, my friends, on my blog. My latest in-depth article (out on 17 May) is about something that really worries me: The threat of pandemics and our general lack of readiness.

WHO’s quick reaction to the Ebola outbreak in D.R.Congo should not delude us into thinking we’re safe. We’re not. We really need to do something about this. Here is the start of the article:

 

GLOBAL HEALTH SYSTEMS: READY FOR THE NEXT PANDEMIC?

In a world traumatized by Trump’s America First agenda, many worry that nuclear conflict is around the corner. As a result, global health tends to be down at the bottom of the list of things to worry about. Yet, as we learned when Ebola struck in 2014, our lead institution, the World Health Organization (WHO), was shockingly slow on the uptake. Our global health governance was just not up to the task.

Now, Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, has just sent a letter to WHO Director-General – a letter also signed by the heads of Norway and Ghana – asking his organization to help draft a “Global Action Plan for Healthy Lives and Well-being for All” to be discussed at the 10th World Health Summit in Berlin in October 2018.

….

The rest on Impakter, click here.


Then, of course, I continued the series of TRUMP WATCH articles. For those of you who are curious to check them out, here’s a listing since the last one I told you about here – in chronological order:

  • North Korea Talks?  Trump seems ready to treat his upcoming North Korea talks as another game of ping pong, telling reporters on Wednesday…
  • Thank You Mary Matalin! On 22 April, out of a clear blue sky, Trump suddenly fawned over Mary Matalin: “I can die happy now…
  • The United States and France Forever!  Trump’s numerous tweets welcoming France’s President Macron on the first state visit of his administration, have been pompously presidential, replete…
  • A Total Witch Hunt  The Russia investigation is a “total” witch hunt, the just released House Intelligence Committee Report has confirmed it! Trump instantly…
  • Russian Collusion is Fake News! Listen to the Donald: This business about the “Witch Hunt” and Russian “Collusion” needs to stop, it’s all “fake news”,..
  • The Iran Deal and North Korea Show is On Nobody noticed but Trump once more exhibited his fine-tuned Reality TV showmanship when he conflated the news about pulling out…
  • Saving Chinese Jobs On Sunday, Trump tweeted his concern for Chinese jobs, vowing that he was working with the Chinese leader to “save…
  • Beautiful, Clean Coal! Coal, historically, is the dirtiest source of energy ever used. Yet, once again, this week-end, Trump tweeted that it was…

Wow, that’s eight Trump Watch articles in one month, and they all zero in on one of the many character traits of the man – it wouldn’t be so bad if he weren’t the most powerful man on earth. But the closer you get to him (as I do, reading his tweets and his pronouncements every day), the scarier it gets…

Incidentally, when I look back, I see that over the last month I also added another article to my series on Bitcoin, reporting on a new development which is (in my view) deeply puzzling:

Sorry for not posting all those updates here, but you can see that I have been overwhelmed with work this month, with 10 articles published on Impakter. Not to mention the work I usually do as Senior Editor…

Comments Off on Fighting the Next Pandemic and Watching Trump

Filed under Business, climate change, Health, politics, social media, writers rights

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , ,

April 14, 2018 · 7:36 pm

TRUMP WATCH: Joining the Trade Pact Against China

This week more of my TRUMP WATCH articles were published on Impakter:

  •  TWEETS OF WAR warning the enemy – in this case Russia – of an impending missile strike in Syria (click here to read – updated with the news of the retaliatory attack on 14 April);  
  • HALF THE COUNTRY IS THE ENEMY: in this one Trump takes aim at California, reviling it as a “sanctuary state” overrun by hordes of criminal immigrants, ascribing the whole sorry situation to the “Dems” (see here);
  • CHEMICAL ATTACKS ON SYRIA: about Trump’s unprecedented tweets against Russia and the fact that, arguably, Trump’s own policies in Syria set the stage for “animal Assad’s” attacks (see here – also updated with the news of the retaliatory attack 14 April).

Here’s the latest one, JOINING THE TRADE PACT AGAINST CHINA, out on Friday 13 April:


Trump just woke up to the complexities of international trade. And how to push China into a corner. In the middle of his trade war with China, he has suddenly caught on to the TPP, the Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership: a clever way for the US to boost trade among Pacific-rim countries while excluding China.

In the middle of the night, this stunning mea culpa was tweeted out:

Well, only half a mea culpa. As usual, it’s Obama’s fault, and he “would only join TPP if the deal were substantially better than the deal offered to Pres. Obama.”

He may feel he has saved face, but in practice, this signals a major reversal in Trumpian trade policies. For once, he’d be joining an international treaty and not trying to pull it down.

And that is huge. Good for him to be able to backtrack.

I go on to analyze the damage done by the US pullout of the TPP and what might happen next now that the TPP has been signed by 11 Pacific rim countries, excluding the US.  

Just as the article was about to be published with a conclusion commending Trump for his wise decision to backtrack (never easy), he blew it, coming out with a seriously absurd blast against Comey and his tell-all book, calling him (among other things) a “slime ball”. 

Take a look, the article is here.

Comments Off on TRUMP WATCH: Joining the Trade Pact Against China

Filed under politics, Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , ,

April 7, 2018 · 9:55 am

TRUMP WATCH: Defying China on Trade

Just published on Impakter. Here’s the opening:


In a single tweet on 5 April, Trump gave a double whammy: against China, reminding everyone that he’s fighting China on trade, and against Amazon’s “chief lobbyist”, the hated “Fake News Washington Post”:

Not bad for a single tweet. To anyone wondering why the Washington Post’s headline is characterized as “phony” when the news about the levying of trade penalties is real enough, the answer is fairly simple.  Trump has recently engaged in an unprecedented flurry of tweets against Amazon, “ranting obsessively about it”. To the point where one is justified in wondering whether he has a personal grudge against Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post.

Maybe he does, but the truth is that the Washington Post has been very good at unearthing uncomfortable news about him. For example, they were the ones who discovered he had given highly classified information to the Russian Foreign Minister and Ambassador in the course of a visit to the White House back in May 2017.

Trade War or Trade Talks?

That’s the real question. Are Trump’s threats of trade penalties the opening salvo of a coming trade war? Or, more simply, trade talks?

Trump has just ordered the US Trade Representative to consider coming up with levies on $100 billion more of Chinese goods (that immediately sent US stock futures tumbling). This came on top of a Chinese announcement on Wednesday that China would levy a 25 percent tariff on about $50 billion of US goods (including soybeans, automobiles, chemicals and aircraft). But the US had started it all, issuing on Tuesday a list of tariffs on $50 billion of Chinese products.

Tit for tat – and a clever tit from China…

Read the rest on Impakter, click here.

Comments Off on TRUMP WATCH: Defying China on Trade

Filed under politics

Tagged as , , , , , ,

March 30, 2018 · 7:15 pm

TRUMP WATCH: A SWIPE AT AMAZON, BUT WHY?

This is the latest Trump Watch article on IMPAKTER – two others were published earlier this week: one about Trump’s obsession with his Border Wall (here) and the other about his thundering silence following last week-end’s March for Our Lives (here) – a silence that I found truly disturbing. 

So now, here is the opening of my latest article in the Trump Watch series:

TRUMP WATCH: A SWIPE AT AMAZON, BUT WHY?

Everybody is getting worked up over Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, but Trump has a grudge against another tech giant: Amazon.

On Thursday he lashed out:

So why this bizarre obsession with Amazon? Because Bezos, the founder of Amazon, owns the Washington Post, one of the papers Trump fears and hates? Maybe.

But there’s another good reason why: Clearly, Trump has no intention to wade into the on-going Facebook-Analytica scandal. Hot stuff, and it could burn him. The fact that the Trump campaign used Analytica’s “psychographs” to sway election results is deeply embarrassing, and it doesn’t help that to do so it used private data stolen from some 50 million American Facebook users. Moreover, Cambridge Analytica has reportedly still not deleted all the user data as promised.

To read the rest, click here. 

Comments Off on TRUMP WATCH: A SWIPE AT AMAZON, BUT WHY?

Filed under politics

Tagged as , , ,

March 23, 2018 · 12:18 pm

Trump Watch: John Bolton – A Super Hawk as National Security Advisor

We’ve started a new series at Impakter, called Trump Watch – in a short piece, we bring our readers up-to-date on the latest developments. This is the third article in the series, my friend Hannah Fischer-Lauder and myself are working on it. But we welcome the contribution of anyone interested. Contact me (see address on my blog) or Impakter (click here: http://impakter.com/contact/). We are looking for short pieces focusing on breaking news, most of them with Trump’s tweets as a starting point.

General H.R. McMaster is out, Ambassador John Bolton is in – with a tweet posted at midnight 22 March:

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

I am pleased to announce that, effective 4/9/18, @AmbJohnBolton will be my new National Security Advisor. I am very thankful for the service of General H.R. McMaster who has done an outstanding job & will always remain my friend. There will be an official contact handover on 4/9.

11:26 PM – Mar 22, 2018

McMaster will move out on 9 April. The job of National Security Advisor does not need Senate confirmation, so Bolton will come on-board as soon as McMaster leaves. And he will be charged with overseeing a wide range of issues, from fighting ISIS to containing China’s rising economic and military power.

International diplomacy is likely to go into shock, John Bolton is not only a confirmed hawk, he is a sworn enemy of the United Nations.

Read the rest on Impakter, click here.

Comments Off on Trump Watch: John Bolton – A Super Hawk as National Security Advisor

Filed under politics

Tagged as , , ,

March 7, 2018 · 7:17 pm

Italian Elections: A Gridlock that Hurts Europe

My latest article on Impakter, here’s the opening:

Last week I asked you to imagine the worst and the worst happened. Gridlock. A hung parliament.

But not quite in the way I thought. The two winners – both populist, Euro-skeptic and anti-establishment – were a big surprise, even for the usually savvy financial markets and yet they didn’t see it coming: the Lega’s firebrand Salvini and Five Star Movement’s bright boy Di Maio won, and won by a big margin.

Everyone had expected Berlusconi (Forza Italia) and Renzi (Democratic Party – PD) to do better, indeed, to do well enough so that in the event of a gridlock, there would be a way out, a possible government based on a Democratic Party (PD) alliance with Forza Italia(FI). After all, Renzi and Berlusconi were on talking terms, so hopes were high, especially in the financial community that prefers to see political stability. Berlusconi himself was so confident that he had already indicated Tajani, the President of the European Parliament, as his choice for Prime Minister.

Now, of course, that won’t happen. FI got stuck at 14% (I’m rounding off all the numbers here) while the PD dropped calamitously below 19%. And that means they just don’t have the numbers to pull it off.

To read the rest, click here. It’s a mess that’s making Marine Le Pen and Putin happy!

Comments Off on Italian Elections: A Gridlock that Hurts Europe

Filed under politics

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

February 26, 2018 · 3:35 pm

Elections in Italy: Why They Matter for Europe and the World

My latest article on Impakter, here’s the opening:

Imagine the following result from the March 4 vote in Italy: either the populist Five Star Movement led by young Luigi Di Maio (he’s 31) or the conservative right coalition, led by Berlusconi (he’s 81) and firebrand Salvini, gets an absolute majority.

What happens next? The pro-European left coalition, with the Democratic Party (PD) in the lead plus various small parties, notably Emma Bonino’s +Europe, is sent in the opposition. The head of the current government, Paolo Gentiloni and the PD secretary, Matteo Renzi, both go home.

italian-elections-collage-di-maio-berlusconi-renzi-with-neo-filter-e1519462767404

From Left to right: M5S Leader Luigi Di Maio; Silvio Berluconi (right coalition); Matteo Renzi  (left coalition, PD leader)  SOURCE: WIKI COMMONS

In either case, Europe, already weakened by Brexit and threatened by the rise of “illiberal democracies” on its Eastern front (in Hungary and Poland), would be shaken to its foundation.

Why?

 

To find out and read the rest, click here.

Comments Off on Elections in Italy: Why They Matter for Europe and the World

Filed under European Union, politics

Tagged as , , , , , ,

February 8, 2018 · 8:32 pm

Bitcoin World: What Next?

I’m starting a series on cryptocurrencies, this is the first article, just published on Impakter:

ICOS: THE RISKS AND HOW TO ADDRESS THEM

 



Recent good news got lost in the midst of a flurry of bad news that shook the Bitcoin world at the end of January, causing a meltdown, with Bitcoin losing two-thirds of its value since hitting a peak of $20,000 in mid-December. Professor Roubini told Bloomberg that Bitcoin is “much worse than the Tulip mania”, that it’s the “mother of all bubbles”. At the time of writing, Bitcoin is still crashing, with no end in sight, though it is still significantly higher than the $900 value recorded a year ago (January 2017).

Among the avalanche of chilling events: the $530 million hack of Coincheck, a Japanese cryptocurrency exchange followed by a raid on the exchange by the Japanese authorities to check whether they had enough funds to repay customers; the Facebook ban on cryptocurrency ads; India’s Finance Minister declaration that cryptocurrencies would not be recognized as legal tender; the subpoena U.S. regulators sent to two of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency players, Bitfinex exchange and Tether, arousing suspicions of price manipulation; the announcement by major American banks (JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup) followed by a UK bank (Lloyds) that, starting in February, they would no longer allow their clients to purchase Bitcoin with credit cards; South Korea Customs Service’s disclosure of illegal Forex tradings of some $600 million worth of cryptocurrencies; North Korea accused of hacking cryptocurrencies and stealing billions of wons;  the finding by a leading cyber security firm that hackers make on average $100 million a year stealing from “miners”.

And yet amongst the wreckage there was some optimistic news. One was the declaration on 31 January from the South Korea Finance Minister that there was no plan to outlaw digital coin trading, which countered an earlier ban announced by the Minister of Justice in September last year.

The other came from the South China Morning Post that announced on January 31 that the Hong Kong authorities would not ban cryptocurrencies but launch in March “a campaign to educate the public” highlighting that “cryptocurrencies have fluctuated in price, are not backed by any physical commodity or the issuer, and are subjected to hacking risks.” Leo Weese, chairman of the Hong Kong Bitcoin Association, is strongly supportive: “We should know the difference between what makes a good ICO [and what doesn’t]” he said, “and how we differentiate between scams and legitimate projects.”

He has good reason to feel this way: ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings) are the vital lymph of cryptocurrency exchanges and for them to function well, there needs to be trust in their legitimacy.

Read the rest on Impakter, click here.

Comments Off on Bitcoin World: What Next?

Filed under Digital Revolution, Economics, politics

Tagged as , , ,

January 18, 2018 · 3:25 pm

Bitcoin: The First Digital Ponzi Scheme

If you had invested $100 in Bitcoin in 2011, two years after it was invented, and if you had held onto it through the 2014 crash, when Mt. Gox, the biggest Bitcoin exchange, collapsed, today you’d have (almost) $4 million in your pocket.

That’s what the Winklevoss twins of Facebook fame and founders of the Gemini exchange did: They are, historically, the first believers and biggest investors in Bitcoin and today, now that they’ve turned bitcoin billionaires in 2017 (the only ones so far), they continue to believe in it, saying they won’t give it up, that “long-term, directionally, it’s a multi-trillion dollar asset”.

2017 was a special year. By December, the valuation of Bitcoin and the 700+ digital currencies that it has spawned had grown explosively, from less than $1,000 per bitcoin to over $15,000. 2018 is not looking so good, market cap is falling, but still high:

As shown above: By end 2017, total market capitalization (value) of all digital currencies exceeded $750 billion, though it is now falling fast and stands well below that value (520 billion on January 17, 2018): this is still and extraordinary multiple (16 times) of where it was a year ago SOURCE: GLOBAL MARKET CAPITALIZATION CHART 28 April 2013 TO 17 January 2018 

On 17 January, Bloomberg spoke of a 26% slump noting that “traders brave the volatility” though some (rightly) worry about the growing threat from government regulations.

SO WHERE ARE WE GOING WITH BITCOIN?

To find out, read the rest on Impakter, click here.

2 Comments

Filed under Business, Economics, politics, Sociology, Tech

Tagged as ,

January 12, 2018 · 7:46 pm

2017: The End of the American Century?

In this article, I try to figure out where we’re going, after the tsunami  brought about by Trump. I am not optimistic but I’m not as pessimistic as some, as you’ll see if you read the article to the end…Happy 2018, we need to continue the resistance, I’m convinced the pre-Trump world order can be revived and American leadership regained!

HOW AMERICA LOST WORLD LEADERSHIP

IN 2017, AMERICA ABRUPTLY CHANGED FACE. IT BECAME A DEEPLY DIVIDED COUNTRY NO LONGER INTERESTED IN WORLD LEADERSHIP. THE QUESTION IS: WHO WILL DOMINATE NEXT, CHINA, EUROPE, RUSSIA? OR IS AN AMERICAN RENAISSANCE POSSIBLE?

Trump’s inaugural speech with its America First message shook the world. And he has kept it up with alarming tweets, insulting and threatening people and countries, sowing confusion among America’s allies and foes. His emotional and erratic tweeting may not add up to a credible foreign policy, he is, in his first year, the least popular President in US history and has signed fewer laws than Obama, yet, with support from the Republican Congress, he has brought deep change: He has successfully turned America in on itself and ushered an age of small government and Big Business.

American institutions are now in the hands of the Republican party. Control over the Supreme Court was achieved with Trump’s appointment of Judge Gorsuch and federal district courts are now filling up with young judges wedded to conservative views. Federal environmental protection regulations are dismantled, the coal and fuel industries can do as they please, the environment and public health be damned.

The tax overhaul benefits primarily the Republican party’s backers, big corporations and multi-millionaires. It also comes with a provision to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And this on top of huge rollbacks in natural reserves, opening up to private exploitation over 2 million acres in Utah.

The only area that has resisted the Trump-Republican onslaught is Obamacare, but not for long. As Trump said at the GOP tax bill celebration, “we peeled Obamacare because we got rid of the individual mandate which was terrible” which is, as he clarified, “a primary source of funding of Obamacare”.

Clever. One can only hope that the Republican party will come up with a solution for the millions of Americans slated to lose coverage. So far, there is none on offer. Foreign observers (myself included) marvel that America has still not accepted the principle of free universal access to healthcare, first launched in Germany in 1883.

Read the rest on Impakter, click here.

Comments Off on 2017: The End of the American Century?

Filed under politics

Tagged as , , , ,