A COVID-19 pause on mass protests won’t shield inept or authoritarian leaders forever

Teenagers around the country have a very specific plan for what they will do when they are released from COVID confinement: party!

Around the world, however, the decriminalization and return of mass gatherings likely will lead to something else: demonstrations!

Governments and regimes everywhere are going to face a greater test of their resilience and staying power once masses of people are freed from public-health fears and able to express their dissent. Demonstrators who were a prominent feature in the streets of Hong Kong or on France’s highways have all been forced to curtail their collective protest activities. Instead of gathering in person, they are cowering from pestilence. READ MORE

Rumors of a leader’s death keep everyone guessing — and that’s the point

Remember where you were when you first heard “Paul is dead?” Boomers easily recall the day their beloved mop-top Beatle was missing, declared dead and gone. It was a traumatic moment for many who saw the signs, found the clues and believed the hype. Paul McCartney had clearly passed away.

It was a déjà vu moment this week when international rumors took flight and premature reports came in declaring the near death of Kim Jong Un. North Korea’s dictatorial ruler and modern mop-top leader was said to have gone through a medical procedure that rendered him at death’s door. As of this writing, these rumors have not been confirmed. What is confirmed is that Kim Jong Un is no Paul McCartney. 

In fact, Kim more likely resembles Fidel Castro.

Castro was regularly rumored to be dead. It became a featured meme. James Cason, who later became Coral Gables mayor, served as head of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana between 2002 and 2005 and once said that Castro “must have died 20 times since the time I went to Cuba.”

Sensational rumors are started and popularly circulated for many reasons. Self-started rumors, for example, are often launched for publicity purposes, as with Morton Downey Jr. or Jussie Smollett. READ MORE

‘Thank you, America, for fueling the Chinese Dream’

It’s nearly graduation time around the country, which can only mean one thing: Boring commencement speeches to indifferent students.

The “Coronavirus Commencements” will be different, however, because graduates will not go through a public processional of pomp and circumstance. They also won’t dine with grandparents who traveled great distances to get to the ceremony. Travel curtailed, campuses closed, bookstores stuck with unsold “Class of 2020” swag. Graduation speakers will stay home to deliver their laugh lines and sage advice as webcammed words of wisdom.

Into this breach, let’s invite an atypical commencement speaker to give a universal graduation speech that can be simulcast to every U.S. institution of higher learning. Who should that person be? The guy who paid for more undergraduates’ educations in America than any other single individual: China’s “Core” leader and Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping. READ MORE

Coronavirus already has changed us for good — and, perhaps, for the better

Is human activity mainly responsible for global climate change? If so, we have just launched an unintentional worldwide experiment to see what happens when productive human activity comes to a screeching halt.

Given the downturn of economic productivity and a shelter-in-place reality for much of the world’s population, the negative effects are likely to outweigh anything positive. As we struggle to find any silver lining in the crisis, we might look to the dramatic reduction of belching factory smokestacks and fuming exhaust pipes. Mother Earth might suddenly and unexpectedly get a much needed and well-deserved rest.

All kinds of bad are happening as a result of the COVID-19 crisis. The volatile stock market eats up 401k account balances. Jobs are lost. Social inequality is broadly exposed. Hospital beds are filled. People are dying.

What’s worse is that we are only beginning to feel the painful and lethal effects of this pandemic. There is no way to sugarcoat this. READ MORE

In Hungary, coronavirus crisis is the perfect time to throw democracy under the bus

In the 1949 film “The Third Man,” set in post-war Vienna, the Austrian capital is a bombed-out city where Orson Welles’ character, Harry Lime, makes a killing on the black market for medical supplies. Lime steals military stocks of penicillin, dilutes the antibiotic and sells it to unsuspecting patients who die from the watered-down drug. 

Profiting in desperate times is immoral and unjustifiable. 

It is also common.

While most people are conscientious, showing strangers compassion, love and selflessness, craven examples abound of certain individuals profiting from the COVID-19 crisis, and others, by hoarding, price gouging or simply leveraging market forces. The $138 bottle of hand sanitizer is the poster child product of this lockdown moment.

Money motivates the unscrupulous and greedy. Power is the other potent aphrodisiac. In its pursuit, power hungry leaders fan the flames of popular fears and exploit nativist anger.

Money and power are a killer combo.

Across the world, from Ankara to Beijing, Caracas to Moscow, powerful (and newly rich) leaders see the current crisis as a way to build themselves an unassailable permanent political role. Case in point? Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán now rules by decree. READ MORE

Honor the heroes of the war against coronavirus with a national monument

Vegas is surreal on any given day. A place of fake pharaonic pyramids, Imperial Roman palaces, Venetian canals, an Eiffel Tower. 

Surreal. 

In the middle of the Las Vegas Strip is the New York-New York hotel-casino complex, with a faux cityscape — a scaled-down skyline. In front of the Statue of Liberty, a faux harbor floats a replica of the New York Fire Department’s fire boat #2 that was spontaneously turned into a living monument to New York 9/11 firefighters.

First responders and citizens garlanded this model city with flowers, firefighter T-shirts, images of the fallen, loving notes. This makeshift 9/11 firefighter memorial told the world that we will never forget the bravery and sacrifice of the first responders who rushed through ash choked streets and into burning buildings to save our souls.

At this moment, we have a new set of heroes putting down their lives to save us from an invisible viral scourge: doctors and nurses. They are on the front lines fighting the coronavirus, intubating patients and working against all odds without sufficient protective gear and medical equipment. 

Naturally, we voluntarily need to stave off the illness and protect our potential saviors — wash your hands!

We also need a way to honor these individuals for their bravery and sacrifice. It’s time to design and fund a meaningful monument to the nation’s medical practitioners. READ MORE

Coronavirus failures are our bad. We’d been warned it was coming for decades

Two years ago, the stock market was on a one-way trajectory: Up. 

In 2018, we watched how bioengineering advances and a technology called CRISPR held the promise of personalized medicine and cures. People lived longer, healthier lives.

That year also was the 100-year anniversary of the globally devastating Spanish Flu pandemic. That silent viral scourge killed more people than World War I. The Spanish Flu took between 50 million and 100 million lives worldwide.

World War I’s occupations, trench warfare, shooting and bombing, and the starvation that followed, killed 20 million. The war’s casualties split nearly evenly between military and civilian deaths; Americans and Europeans. READ MORE

Pigs in China have their own deadly pandemic. Xi Jinping better beware

One little piggy went to market, one little piggy got sick, one little piggy got culled —
…and joined 40 percent of China’s little piggies that went wee-wee-wee all the way to burial pits. 

During the past 19 months, the world’s largest pork market lost almost half of its pigs to an illness that went unreported and unchecked, and is now crossing borders threatening livestock elsewhere in Asia and the world.

Global worries about the coronavirus as a global pandemic are just the latest public-health scare that took flight in China. The African Swine Fever has run rampant in the People’s Republic since 2018 and has devastated the country’s pork production and markets.

The collapse of oil prices and demand, the wildly volatile stock market, and the social disruption across America due to the Coronavirus pandemic are all serious. So is any global threat to food stocks.

Pork is a staple meat for the Chinese and a primary source of protein in the People’s Republic of China. The bad news? The hog stock has collapsed, and the pig population is decimated. There is little to do about this immediately in a country where pork production is done in conditions dominated by small farms and backyard pigsties. Industrialized production is not widespread.  READ MORE

Trump is to Obama the way FDR was to Hoover, a sad waste of ‘president power’

Presidential elections are on everyone’s minds and TV sets these days because presidents matter. In America’s democracy, presidents are its singular most important leaders. Heightened attention to their selection and performance reflects how critical they are to the nation’s strength and survival.

In February, five living presidents were celebrated — Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. It is a remarkable democratic achievement and a testament to America’s confidence that the country transitions power peacefully from administration to administration regardless of political party. Republicans yield to Democrats who yield to Republicans. 

Unlike other countries, America’s previous presidents are neither hounded nor capriciously thrown in jail. Instead, our former commanders-in-chief live and travel freely. READ MORE

China’s news organizations in the United States are really spy agencies

A decade ago, I first saw signs that Chinese news organizations were operating as global spy dens and diplomatic outposts. Last week, America decided not only to call them out for what they do, but to punish them further for this activity within the United States. 

It’s about time.

It’s also time to counter China and help American journalism survive.

My 2018 book “Spin Wars & Spy Games: Global Media and Intelligence Gathering” detailed how China’s global news organizations are used to advance its national interests. China — and also Russia — uses its foreign news bureaus as fronts for editors and journalists to work as both witting and unwitting spies. My research over the years shows that these news bureaus’ primary responsibility is to report to their countries’ political leadership in Beijing. READ MORE

There’s always a way to get a country’s most-wanted out of hostile territory

“Argo” was a Ben Affleck film based on the true story of how a little CIA ingenuity and stealth freed a group of hiding humans. 

A CIA team planned a low-tech, high-risk fake Hollywood movie production to sneak Americans out of Tehran. If caught, the Americans would have faced assured injustice and quickly turned from fugitives to hostages of the new Iranian regime. From Iran to China, Afghanistan to Bolivia, the story is a familiar one: Desperate individuals sometimes need to escape a foreign country’s authorities and get beyond a nation’s jurisdiction.

All countries — whether revolutionary regimes or democratic governments — pursue sovereign justice. National judicial systems reign supreme in the international system. Nations get to decide what to do inside their borders and who is guilty or innocent within their countries. President Trump’s foreign-policy doctrine defending the primacy of national sovereignty further cements this custom into practice.

In 1980s Iran, the newly formed interim government sought flimsy justice for what Iranian student revolutionaries believed were historic U.S. human-rights transgressions. The new and freshly violent Iran wanted retribution, remuneration and just plain revenge against America. READ MORE

Autocrats on the left and right are deserting Trump and embracing China

Venezuela is a bipolar nation in the eyes of the world. More than 50 countries recognize the government of interim President Juan Guaidó. The rest of the world — most significantly Russia and China — continue to support and strengthen the grip of President Nicolás Maduro.

It’s bad enough that the Trump administration has been all bark and no bite, trying to flip the failed Latin American state’s leadership with tough rhetoric and State of the Union ovations. What’s worse is that America under its current leadership has shown that there are neither significant consequences nor consequential actions that can be taken when a foreign country snubs Washington in favor of Moscow or Beijing.

The latest nation to reject President Trump’s foreign policy puffery? The former American colonyand current conflict-ridden country of the Philippines. READ MORE

From Trump to Rouhani, losers take the hit for the offenses of the powerful

Murder took place as the airplane was lifting off the runway, a lethal shot taken in the Humphrey Bogart movie, “Casablanca.” Rick Blaine pulled the trigger in front of the French police prefect Captain Renault. The Vichy official witnessed it. He allowed it. And then Renault uttered those infamous words that said everything, but meant nothing: “Round up the usual suspects.”

Murder also took place just as the airplane was taking off last month from Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport. Missiles were fired at the Ukraine International Airlines plane, killing all 176 passengers and crew on board. Iranian officials witnessed it. They may even have ordered it. The government then made a predictable and cowardly move by rounding up the usual suspects.

Iran’s government is the latest authority preparing a show trial intended to bring peace to the streets and some justice to the murdered victims of Ukraine flight PS 752. Street protests were launched in Tehran shortly after the commercial Boeing 737 was felled from the sky by a land-based missile. Iranian authorities eventually suggested that errant, on-edge operators brought down the jet at a moment of high tension and an anticipated American attack. The shooters will go to jail. Or worse. READ MORE

The United Kingdom leaves the European Union

The United Kingdom officially left the European Union on Friday. Markos Kounalakis, a foreign affairs syndicated columnist at McClatchy, joined CBSN to break it all down. VIEW SEGMENT

The Super Bowl teams’ mascots have some ugly history behind them

Super Bowl Sunday is a uniquely American celebration of guts and grit, cash and commercialism. It’s our annual ritual and favored sport. Thanksgiving is the only other American holiday that Super Sunday rivals.

This year it’s San Francisco versus Kansas City in Miami for Super Bowl LIV,” the 54th championship gladiator event.

But before there was the NFL, there were real 49ers who fought against actual chiefs. It was history’s Version 1.0 of a non-gridiron battle where native sons fought Native Americans. This partly forgotten fight remains a shameful part of U.S. history. That long-ago chapter is relevant today, at a time when racism and foreign immigration remain hot-button political issues. READ MORE