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Tag: Trump

25/11/2023

Argentinian Populist Wins Election

25 November 2023

I visited Argentina, Uruguay and Chile for 4 weeks over Christmas 2018-9.

Argentina was a pleasant, orderly, developed country. The people were friendly, and you could sit in cafes in town squares where flamenco dancers performed, supported by tips from the enthusiastic locals and tourists. The main part of Buenos Aires had been built, modelled on Paris around 1900, when Argentina was relatively rich because of beef prices. As commodities fell in price relative to manufactured goods, their economy has suffered. But the fine buildings in the centre of the city remain. They have alternated between leftist governments that nationalise and take resources from the foreigners and right wing governments, usually supported by the US, who privatise and encourage foreign investment, then use repression to control the people.

The government, when we were there was middle of the road, but having trouble controlling inflation, which was at around 40%. From a visitors point of view, things were cheap, a meal for two with wine less than half what it would have been in a Sydney pub. We did not feel unsafe.

Because of the concerns with the inflation problem, there were worries about democracy in the future, given the history of right-wing coups in many South American countries.

There had been a military coup in 1975, which seems to have been US-facilitated and the military junta had been in power from 1976 to 1983. Approximately 30,000 people who had been arrested ‘disappeared’. They were part of a wider ‘Operation Condor’ to persecute and eliminate political, social, trade-union and student activists from Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil by the right-wing governments in those countries. The US CIA provided the database so was well aware of what was happening.

Even now, every Thursday at 1pm the mothers and sisters of ‘The Disappeared’ dress in white and walk in pairs around a statue in Plaza de Mayo outside the Parliament. The women had started protesting in 1977, but anything more than two people walking together was termed a crowd’ and thus illegal. Of those who perpetrated this atrocity only one soldier actually told the tale of what happened. Some of the disappeared had simply been shot in mass graves, but others went to the Naval training headquarters in Buenos Aires where they were kept in the attic and tortured in the basement. Some were released, but others were drugged with thiopentone, loaded into trucks, then planes and dumped into the Atlantic Ocean. Some were made to call their families with a gun at their heads and say that they could not talk, but they were happy in a new life in Paris or some other unlikely tale.

Survivors described how they had a hood over their head at all times and could only see their feet. They described the steps and the colour of the walls, and where the phone was that they had to speak on and the lift next to the phone. Later, the government came, took out the lift and the phone and painted the walls of the Naval training centre a different colour, so that the building would not match the descriptions of the inmates. Naturally there were no plans of the building changes available. The area was a museum when we were there and there was a small research area, still trying to identify individuals and what had happened to them. They were worried that the government would defund them and close their museum.

Now a far-Right populist, Javier Milei, has won the election, promising to abolish the Central Bank, change the currency to the US dollar, privatise everything and make guns freely available. He denies climate change and the crimes of the previous military junta. He has been congratulated by Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, the recently defeated populist from Brazil. He also wants to re-take the Malvinas aka the Falklands. There is little hope of this simplistic nonsense improving anything in Argentina. The worry is not only that the ‘Museum to the Disappeared’ will disappear, but that it will all happen again.

www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/20/argentina-presidential-election-far-right-libertarian-javier-milei-wins-after-rival-concedes

14/01/2021

Congress Impeaches Trump- What is Next? 14/1/21

Congress, the lower house of the US Parliament has quickly voted to impeach Trump for false claims of election fraud and his part in inciting the storming of the US Congress. That is today.

Tomorrow in 50 State Capitals there will be demonstrations by Trump supporters carrying guns. This vote will not make them happy. It is hard to believe that there will not be violence somewhere and that there will not be deaths. I would not like to be a policemen in the front line of controlling these armed demonstrators.

After the demonstrations the Senate, the upper house, which has even numbers of Democrats and Republicans with only the casting vote of the Democrat speaker will consider the impeachment. My understanding is that to stop Trump standing again, a two-thirds majority is needed, so a third of Senate Republicans would have to support the motion. If the demonstrations turn ugly, will they?

The other question is whether the Democrats will bring it on immediately. The inauguration of the new President Biden is in 6 days, on 20/1/21. The nature of this ceremony was likely to be hugely modified by COVID, but now there is a new security dimension. Biden will also want to have his legislative agenda pushed forward, as there is a huge demand for action in many areas, and impeaching a soon-to-be-ex-President, or an actual ex- President may seem an act of petty revenge, particularly if it is delayed. Biden needs to be seen to be bringing the US together and getting on with the job, but he is unlikely to let the issue go.

The next few days will be interesting, even by 2020 standards.

www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/10-house-republicans-voted-to-impeach-trump-heres-what-they-said

08/01/2021

US Election Aftermath 8/1/21

All the commentators are saying that Trump has no case and that the US election was properly run and the result is correct. No doubt they are right as far as they go.

But we might ask why people are so upset that they will storm the Capitol and make the US look like a tin pot third world rabble, where police line up to stop raging demonstrators and shoot a few.

Many years as a young child I went to the first version of ‘Around the World in 80 Days’ with my mother. There is scene in that with a huge rally with banners, shouting, festivities and people squirting each other with hoses. I asked my Mom, ‘What are they doing?’. She replied, ‘They are having an election, son’. I said, ‘That is not how you have elections’. She said. ‘It’s how they do it over there’.

It has always stuck on my mind. She regarded the US as not actually a civilised country. At that time we watched Westerns where they had shoot outs and wars with the baddies a.k.a Indians. Later she explained that they carried guns and had no health system for poor people. When my parents retired they went on a trip to the USA and were held up at gunpoint at their motel in Los Angeles by men who needed money for drugs, which tended to prove her point.

This morning on Radio National singer/songwriter Tori Amos told of how as an aspiring artist she played in bars and heard how the powers behind the throne arranged judicial appointments such that there was a court decision to allow unlimited money into political donations without the source of it being clear.

Looking at the choices of president facing the US electors last time, there was Trump, the anti-Establishment TV reality host v. Hillary Clinton, an existing Establishment figure. The progressive voice of Bernie Sanders had been eliminated. This time there was Trump with his failed rhetoric and COVID non-policies against Biden, an existing Establishment figure. Sanders had again been side-lined. So, yes the count was correct, but how much use is this to the common person, whose job is no longer secure and whose income has not risen for decades?

Inequality has been rising apace. Everyone may be aware of this, but some are more aware than others, some are much more affected than others, and some want to do much much more about it than others.

The vote count and procedures may be correct, but the system is not delivering a fair outcome. Taking jobs from US workers to ones in China or elsewhere allows importers to make supernormal profits, and this process, which amounts to the undoing of colonialism where the raw materials came from overseas and were processed in the First World will not be complete until all the world’s workers are equal. In the meantime, the poor in the First World get a lot poorer and the rich, initially in the First World, but now elite as much by class as by nationality, get richer (as Marx had predicted).

The Trump demonstrators are wrong about the election, but not so wrong if you talk about the system and their place in it. Sanders may have had a solution, Trump never did. The US elite have avoided confronting the issue so far, but it is still there, and will be ongoing.

Here is Bob Carr, ex-NSW Premier and ex- US Foreign Minister writing about how the problem will not go away. He is less specific on why.

www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/capitol-chaos-is-just-the-first-act-the-republican-party-is-shattered-and-civility-is-not-coming-back-20210107-p56sdw.html

19/12/2020

The Evolution of Lying Proceeds Apace: New Daily 19/12/20.

When Trump was elected people asked me what he would be like. I said something like, ‘in any situation think what a dodgy real estate agent would do in that situation and you have my best prediction’.

Trump’s idea of truth was that it what is in your interest and what you can convince someone to believe. If you look at the real estate model of truth this is a ‘goer’. You convince someone that a property is worth a certain amount, even if its not. It the person believes you and pays the price, that becomes the value. and what you said becomes the truth.

Sadly, the paradigm does not work at all with science, and not even reliably in politics. But it takes some time for this to become evident, so the disinformation strategy still mostly works.

Morrrison invites journalists to a ‘briefing’ before he releases news. So if the coverage of the last issue was not to the government’s liking- no invitation this time. Journalists are in the unenviable position of getting a story and having to cover it s a certain way, or being scooped- the only one on the block without the story, bleating later. The technique is now called ‘media management’.

Here is Dennis Atkins with more on how it is done.

https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/politics/australian-politics/2020/12/19/scott-morrison-political-liars/

28/05/2020

Truth in the COVID-19 Era: The USA

Some of us watch the COVID-19 statistics with fascination try to work out which policies will stop the march of the virus. This has become all the more urgent as countries try to break the lockdown to restart their economies. The US has overtaken Western Europe (29 countries) in the number of cases by about […]

30/04/2020

US Health System is worst to control COVID-19 Epidemic

30 April 2020The US health system which is largely private is poorly set up to handle a pandemic. It is set up to make money, so is not flexible when different equipment and procedures are needed. Added to this 12% of people have no health care insurance, so cannot get healthcare and of those insured, […]

09/11/2016

Trump’s Win- why? 9/11/16

Here is my theory. Basically democracy in English speaking countries has been taken over by private entities. There are only two entities who can win power in the UK, USA and Australia. They are called political parties. They are not in the constitution, but because they vote as a bloc, they control the parliament. Because they are private entities they do what their donors want. Few citizens want privatisation, but the donors to the parties do- so we get privatisation. Few want to go to war, but for some reason the parties do, so we go to war. We want universal health cover- Medicare, but it gets rolled back and we have to buy private health insurance, which suits that lobby. Unemployment is rising and the government fiddles the figures and no longer takes responsibility for the problem, it just talks about ‘the market’. What the people think or want does not actually matter. The parties continually put their interests and power ahead of what the people want. The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer and the political parties do not seem to care. They get donations from the rich, and run campaigns to convince the poor to vote for them.

Faced with this situation and two political parties, people are accustomed to voting for the lesser of two evils, or making a protest vote, which is what they did. Trump was anti ‘the system’, so although he was deeply flawed personally that was enough. The Democrat Party machine had got rid of Sanders, the leftist challenger to the status quo, so it became status quo Clinton v. Non status quo Trump. Then the polls got it totally wrong. How come? Part of the same thing- the whole polling establishment obviously had a large segment of the population missing from their sample, but did not know it- like the government really. So if some people did not vote for Clinton because they were disgusted and thought it would not matter, they were wrong.

But if the level of disgust in the process of government is enough to turn a US Presidential election, one must also wonder about the effect of the media. For years, news has been replaced by infotainment. What is important is replaced by what is titillating or exciting. News is trivial, what is important is often not covered, particularly things like falling middle class jobs and stagnating wages. The media is the message. If you are not in the media, the message is that you do not matter. But also note the rise of ignorance. Quiz shows used to ask historic or scientific facts. Now it is TV trivia. And ‘shock jocks’ on commercial media are there to shock and to push products. They do not have to be consistent or informed- just entertaining enough to rate and bring in advertising dollars. So the non-expert, pontificating and criticising overcomes the expert discussing sensibly- how many of those are on TV? The shock jock has become more important than the politician. So why are we surprised when it now happens in real life? The shock jock beat the politician. And the pollsters got it wrong again- just like in Brexit.

What will happen with Trump in charge? He will destroy Obamacare, the relatively minor improvements made towards a universal health system, appoint Conservative Supreme Court judges and officials in public policy such as Climate Change, and boost gun ownership. More significant changes to corporate power will take the approval of Congress and the House, now both Republican-controlled. Obama was elected on the slogan, ’Change is possible’. Obstruction by the Republicans ensured it was not. Now Trump will try, but the same obstructers now have even more power and are not about to let one of their own damage their interests. So Trump is unlikely to be a force for good unless he has unexpected foreign policy triumphs.

So what is the long-term solution to government ruling for the rich by buying political parties? Democracy has to be taken back to the people. The Parliament is controlled by parties and they are private entities and so can be bought by other private interests. This has ever been the case in systems that evolved in Westminster. It is Anglo-Saxon arrogance that makes us think that our democracy is best. Quite simply, it isn’t. Our political power structures, like our corporate structures concentrate power at the top. Swiss democracy involves power being moved down as low as possible with politicians merely enacting what public referenda decide, and with no opportunity for individual politicians to get long-term power structures assembled for themselves. It is time we looked at these models and worked for constitutional change based on a real change of philosophies, priorities and power.

09/11/2016

Trump’s Win- Why?

9 November 2016 Here is my theory. Basically democracy in English speaking countries has been taken over by private entities. There are only two entities who can win power in the UK, USA and Australia. They are called political parties. They are not in the constitution, but because they vote as a bloc, they control […]