'Worst Americans of 2021': Biden, Trump, Musk, Murdoch top the list

A US-based news organization has come out with a list of ‘the 10 worst Americans of 2021’, which includes, among others, President Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Rupert Murdoch. 

In an article by Jon Schwarz in The Intercept, President Joe Biden, who took office in January 2021 after defeating his Republican rival Donald Trump in a bitterly-contested, controversy-marred election, is placed at the second position, after senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.

“Biden would be on this list no matter what, because he is president of the United States. All presidents are ex officio members of any group of terrible Americans,” he writes about the Democratic president.

The article slams Biden for establishing “a kind of global vaccine apartheid”, under which “rich countries have vaccinated 65 percent of their population against COVID-19, while poor countries have only been able to vaccinate 3 percent.”

“This has the twin virtues of being both mind-numbingly cruel and unbelievably stupid,” writes Schwarz. “Omicron may turn out, knock on wood, to be less deadly than previous variants. But until most everyone on the planet has lasting immunity to Covid-19, we will continue to be rolling the dice, over and over and over again.”

Biden’s predecessor, real-estate developer and businessman, Donald Trump also figures on the list, at 6.

“There’s no need to enumerate the downsides of Trump,” notes the article, in a swipe at the megalomaniac former US president. “Everyone is capable of doing that themselves.”

The controversy-prone American entrepreneur and business magnate, Elon Musk, is placed above Trump but below Biden on the ill-famed list.

“He’s engaged in union busting, built a gigantic fortune on government subsidies and government research, made preposterous predictions about the self-driving capacity of Tesla cars, and potentially undermined the safety of Tesla owners and those around them,” the article talks about America’s wealthiest man.

Another controversial American business tycoon, Rupert Murdoch, also finds himself on the list.

The 91-year-old Murdoch, the article asserts, has been around so long that “it’s easy to forget what an extraordinarily bad person he is.”

“He’s generated a cult that now comprises perhaps 25 percent of Americans, who are lost in a fantasy world in which there are no such things as global warming, evolution, or any trustworthy figures outside the cult,” it says about the man who controls a media empire that includes Fox News, The Times of London and The Wall Street Journal.

The COVID-19 profiteers also feature on the list. The article says the pandemic turned “nine pharma executives and investors” into billionaires.

“They now have a combined wealth of almost $20 billion. But there’s more: Eight other pharma investors who were already billionaires pre-COVID have increased their wealth by another $32 billion,” it notes.

“This has only been possible thanks to a massive government intervention in the market via monopoly patent protection — for vaccines that were largely developed via government funding.”

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