Why America Leads the World in Covid-19 Cases

Eric Zuesse, originally posted at The Saker

At of the start of the day on April 9th, the United States, which has 4.2% of the world’s population, had 28.7% of the world’s known Covid-19 (or “coronavirus-19”) cases.

This infection-rate tends to be higher in cities than in rural areas. 82% of America’s population is urban. 55% of the world’s population is urban. The most-urbanized nations (100% urban), and their respective number of Covid-19 cases as of April 9th (shown in parentheses), are Bermuda (39), Cayman Islands (45), Gibraltar (120), Hong Kong (961), Kuwait (855), Monaco (81), Nauru (none shown), and Singapore (1,623).

Hong Kong has 7,483,870 population, and that’s 2.2% as large as America’s population. If Hong Kong had as high a percentage of its population as Covid-19 cases as the U.S. does, it would have 9,862 cases, not 961. If Singapore (population 5,839,210) did, it would have 7,697 cases, not 1,623.

Japan is 92% urban, and has 4,667 cases, and if it had the same percentage of its population being infected with Coronavirus-19 as U.S. does, Japan’s number of confirmed cases would be 12,227, instead of 4,667.

Russia is 74% urban (not much different from America’s 82%). If it had the same percentage of its population infected with coronavirus-19 as the U.S. does, it would have 192,454 cases. Instead, it has 8,672 cases.

Why is this? Some of those differences between the U.S. and other countries are enormous, but all are multiples, not merely percentages. Regarding Covid-19 infections, the U.S. really has no competitor: it is the world’s lone giant.

At the present stage, only a hypothesis can be put forward, not a theory. Here are the news-reports that particularly inform mine:

“Oversight sputters as Trump starts doling out billions in coronavirus aid”, from Kyle Cheney, at Politico.

“The Post-Coronavirus World Will be Far Worse Than the Pre-Coronavirus World”, from me, at Global Research (and elsewhere), explaining what Kyle Cheney reported.

My hypothesis, therefore, is that America is actually the world’s most corrupt country (other than, perhaps, some countries south of the equator, which are yet to be hit hard by Covid-19 as their winter comes on).

One of those nations is Venezuela. America’s National Public Radio’s (NPR’s) “Morning Edition” program headlined on April 9th, “Economic, Political Crises Hinder Venezuela’s Pandemic Battle” and reported that, “Venezuela is in no position to fight COVID-19. Its health care system collapsed long before the virus hit, leaving hospitals without running water and soap, much less ventilators or PPE.” As one would expect in a profoundly corrupt country, that report is hostile toward the Government of Venezuela, though Venezuela has never invaded nor even threatened to invade the United States. It’s treated as an enemy though not explicitly said to be an enemy. The report opened: “Venezuela is in particularly weak position to fight this pandemic. The country is in the middle of an economic and political crisis. Nicolas Maduro’s government has reported ONLY 165 corona virus cases, but many people doubt those numbers, and they worry that a humanitarian crisis is about to get a lot worse.” The slant (the propagandists’ assumption) is that “Nicolas Maduro’s government” is to blame for this (which is itself a vicious lie) and is lying because that’s what America’s ‘enemies’ (such as Venezuela — which actually never endangered Americans) do. The U.S.-imposed sanctions build upon the pre-existing Venezuelan tragedy (which NPR’s report lies about in multiple ways). The appeal is to the stupidity, the misplaced trust, of the American people. The appeal is being made based on the American people’s having been indoctrinated, so as not to understand the difference between the function that inter-national law is supposed to serve — to control the interrelations between nations — and the function that intra-national law is supposed to serve (to protect the rights of all of the people who are living within a given nation). This confusion started on 26 July 1945, barely three months after U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) died on April 12th of that year, and Harry S. Truman — a well-intentioned fool who quickly became duped by America’s wealthiest citizens and their agents, who surrounded him — became suckered, mainly by General Dwight D. Eisenhower, to believe that if the Soviet Union would not become conquered ultimately by the United States, then the United States would become conquered ultimately by the Soviet Union. So: the Cold War started on that date. The next stage of that basically organized criminal and secret operation, of enforced lying, occurred on 24 February 1990, when U.S. President G.H.W. Bush secretly started, on that date, instructing America’s European vassal-nations that after communism in the Soviet Union would soon end and the U.S.S.R. would soon break up and the Warsaw Pact (the Soviets’ military alliance they had established in response to the U.S. regime’s having established its anti-Soviet NATO military alliance as a consequence of Truman’s having been duped on 26 July 1945 to start the Cold War) would also soon end, the U.S.-and-allied side would secretly continue the Cold War after Russia would quit it (which happened in 1991) — continue it (even now with zero ideological reason) in order to conquer, ultimately, Russia itself. This is pure imperialism. The United Nations, which FDR had established shortly before his death, in order to put in place international law as being truly and exclusively international and no merely national legislation, became established, under Truman, as instead allowing international law to dictate (as ‘human rights’) what laws individual nations must have. This, of course, destroyed the U.N., at its very start, and presented the U.S. Government’s conception of “human rights” as being a ‘just’ cause for America and its vassals (“allies”) establishing international sanctions against, and for perpetrating coups against, and even for outright militarily invading, any country it wished.

On April 8th, The Grayzone headlined “Billionaire-backed Human Rights Watch lobbies for lethal US sanctions on leftist governments as Covid crisis rages” and reported that, “Regime change-hungry HRW is proudly taking credit for crushing new US sanctions on Nicaragua while pushing to escalate Washington’s economic war on Venezuela.”

All of these things are what one would reasonably expect to come from the world’s most corrupt nation: a psychopathically ruled country, which ceaselessly seeks to impose itself upon the rest of the world as the unchallengeable global empire, ruling, actually, everywhere. The way that U.S. President Barack Obama stated it was that “The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation”, so that every other nation is “dispensable” and therefore could justifiably be destroyed by America if America’s rulers — its billionaires — collectively decide to do that. This is, for example, the reason why European nations cower in fear of having the U.S. regime’s crushing secondary sanctions imposed upon themselves if they fail to comply with the U.S. regime’s sanctions against Iran and Venezuela. These are economic blockades against Venezuela and Iran, that are intended to destroy Iran and Venezuela if those countries fail to overthrow their existing Governments and replace those with stooge-regimes that America’s billionaires will find acceptable.

Here is an excellent 1992 BBC documentary about how Truman’s CIA used supporters of Hitler and of Mussolini after World War II so as to fool European publics to hate and fear the Soviet Union, by setting up terrorist incidents in America’s European allies, so as to be falsely reported to have been perpetrated instead by the Soviet Union. This is remarkably similar to what U.S. President Barack Obama did to Ukraine (and which his successor Trump continues there). It is equally effective now, as it was under Eisenhower.

This is what one would expect the world’s most corrupt country to do. The ferocity of the Covid-19 epidemic inside America itself is entirely consistent with America’s being the world’s most corrupt nation, and can reasonably be said to result from this extraordinary corruption.

The corruption that is referred to here is not partisan; it isn’t by the Republican Party or by the Democratic Party. It is bipartisan. For example, the sanctions against both Venezuela and Iran were passed with close to 100% of the members of both of America’s political Parties voting for them (for example: 419 to 3 in the House). The corruption runs far deeper — as one would expect if America is the world’s most corrupt country.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.