Ratings slump après Trump — could “fake news” become reality?
After a historic 64-day wait for President Biden’s first press conference on March 25, 2021, one would have expected someone in the Press Corps to ask one of those proverbial $64,000 questions. Instead, we got a largely tedious display of journalists from the so-called “liberal media” trying to outdo one another in their hopes of snagging a memorable soundbite from the president, who has previously self-confessed to being a “gaffe machine.” Also, Biden’s critics in the right-wing media, especially the opinion pundits of Fox News, had been deriding the president for weeks and thus lowering expectations for his presser performance…
Inevitable fallout from SPACulation won’t be without pain.
On March 4, 2021 Fast Money posted this review of SPACs under a provocative title, “SPACs are an inside joke on Wall Street, and the joke is on you” and it had an even gloomier sub header, “SPACs can operate like ‘venture capital in the public markets,’ which may appeal to amateurs seeking their inner Elon Musk. But it rarely works out well for the retail crowd.” Ouch!
A few weeks earlier on Feb 9, 2021 CNBC had headlined a report, “Sam Zell calls SPAC craze largely ‘rampant speculation’ reminiscent of 1990s dot-com bubble,” in which Mr. Zell had used…
Follow the money instead with the new TMM — Total Monetizable Market
The concept of Total Addressable Market, or TAM as it is popularly called, has taken the business world by storm in recent years. Back in October 2020, the Financial Times (FT) in an article, “The total addressable market craze is detached from reality,” cautioned about the burgeoning trend among “companies using the term in their pre-IPO S-1 filings relative to the past five years.” A related graph depicted TAM references exploding from under 5 in 2016 to almost 50 in the first nine months of 2020. …
Trump’s marauders: they came, they saw, they ransacked the seat of American democracy
EllipseGate — Trump launches deadly insurrection with an incendiary speech.
We are the world’s oldest democracy, but we can no longer claim to be the world’s greatest democracy after what happened on January 6, 2021. The horror began at the Ellipse; a public park which has the iconic White House South Portico as a backdrop. On that fateful day, President Trump incited an insurrection in his speech at the Ellipse. …
Trumpism redefines Republicans and realpolitik at great cost to our nation
In my Washington Post letter of December 21, 2020 headlined, “Republicans’ tone-deaf fealty,” I had said, in part:
“One wonders whether Republicans in the United States fear President Trump more than Russians fear their president, Vladimir Putin. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) finally congratulated President-elect Joe Biden on his victory — only after Mr. Putin had done so early on Dec. 15. Is it possible that Mr. McConnell surmised Mr. Trump couldn’t do much damage to the Republican flock once Mr. Putin had thrown in the towel?”
Trump must feel a sense of betrayal, but Putin has proven to…
Historic “twofer” at year-end puts annus horribilis 2020 behind us
“On the first day I’m inaugurated, I’m going to ask the public for 100 days to mask. Just 100 days to mask — not forever, just 100 days… Secondly, this team will help get… at least 100 million COVID vaccine shots into the arms of the American people in the first 100 days.”
— President-elect Joe Biden proclaimed on December 8, 2020.
That day happened to be the 40th death anniversary of John Lennon, the Beatle peacenik. So, one can only “imagine” how he might have reacted in these times of tremendous national discord, in which the simple wearing of…
The people have spoken, the courts have ruled… it’s time to move on!
President Trump’s refusal to concede an election that he so clearly lost, affirms behavior encapsulated in the first half of an old adage, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Four years of unbridled — thanks largely to supine Republican leaders — presidential power has corrupted Trump’s thinking to such a degree that it has rendered him incapable of giving up that power. Hence, all of his absurd shenanigans, which include frivolous lawsuits and outrageous presidential proclamations. These desperate efforts to cling on to power are rightly being discounted, more or less, by prominent media outlets that swear…
Four years of “America First” and “truth decay” has made US an international pariah
President Trump might have had noble intentions when he promised to “Make America Great Again” by putting “America First.” However, a dispassionate look at his actual track record — notwithstanding the popular slogans — clearly shows he has failed on both, foreign policy and international trade.
RCEP lands in the Indo-Pacific.
While Trump was conducting a futile trade war with China, the world’s second largest economy was negotiating a major trade deal, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership or RCEP, with 14 other nations in the Asia-Pacific region. Quite deliberately, the Trump administration early in its term had not only rebranded…
America is at a turning point — it’s the proverbial time to dance, cast away stones and build up
In the most consequential presidential election of our lifetime, Joe Biden lived up to the old adage, “third time’s a charm.” Biden, who has been running for president since 1988, actually threw in the towel in 2015 after the passing of his son, Beau. But then, in August 2017, following a violent white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, President Trump made his infamous reference to “very fine people on both sides.” This deeply offensive remark propelled Biden to reconsider his presidential ambitions and run for a third time. The rest as they say is history!
It’s quite telling that Biden…
After four years, “America First” looks more like “America Worst”
In the New York Times October 18, 2020 Sunday Review op-ed, “The Foreign Policy That Wasn’t,” Serge Schmemann writes:
“‘From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first,’ Mr. Trump warned in his Inaugural Address. Today, what that meant is clear in the decline of American leadership and the hallowed American brand, in the wariness of allies and the glee of strongmen.”
Since WWII there had been a remarkable consistency in our foreign policy. In 1948, the Republican leader of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Arthur Vandenberg, sought a bipartisan U.S. response to post-WWII security across the…
Jack Nargundkar
Jack Nargundkar is an author, freelance writer, and marketing consultant, who writes about high-tech, economics, foreign policy and politics.
