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Is Donald Trump really as stupid as the press seems to think? And if not, how do we explain the press’s version of countless Trumpian controversies lately?
Take, for instance, the Kovaleski affair. According to a recent Bloomberg survey, no controversy has proven more costly to Trump.
The episode began when, in substantiating his erstwhile widely ridiculed allegation that Arabs in New Jersey had publicly celebrated the Twin Towers attacks, Trump unearthed a 2001 newspaper account in which law enforcement authorities were stated to have detained “a number of people who were allegedly seen celebrating the attacks and holding tailgate-style parties on rooftops while they watched the devastation on the other side of the river.” This seemed to settle the matter. But the report’s author, Serge Kovaleski, demurred. Trump’s talk of “thousands” of Arabs, he alleged, was an exaggeration.
Trump fired back. Flailing his arms wildly in an impersonation of an embarrassed, backtracking reporter, he implied that Kovaleski had bowed to political correctness.
So far, so normal for this election cycle. But it turned out that Kovaleski is no ordinary Trump-dissing media liberal. He suffers from arthrogryposis, a malady in which the joints are malformed.
For Trump’s critics, this was manna from heaven. Instead of merely accusing the New York real estate magnate of exaggerating a minor, if disturbing, sideshow in U.S.-Arab relations, they could now arraign him on the vastly more damaging charge of mocking a disabled person.
Trump pleaded that he hadn’t known Kovaleski was handicapped. This was undermined, however, when it emerged that in the 1980s the two had not only met but Kovaleski had even interviewed Trump in Trump Tower. Trump was reduced to pleading a fading memory, something that those of us of a certain age can sympathize with, but, of course, it didn’t wash with Trump’s accusers.
In responding directly to the charge of mocking a disabled person, Trump commented: “I would never do that. Number one, I have a good heart; number two, I’m a smart person.” Setting aside point one (although to the press’s chagrin, many of Trump’s acquaintances have testified that a streak of considerable private generosity underlies his tough-guy public image), it is hard to see how anyone can question point two. Even if he really is the sort of unspeakable buffoon who might mock someone’s disability, he surely has enough political smarts to know that there is no profit in doing so in a public forum.
There has to be something else here, and, as we will see, there is. Key details have been swept under the rug. We will get to them in a moment but first let’s review the wider context. Candidate Trump’s weaknesses are well-known. He is unusually thin-skinned and can readily be lured into tilting at windmills. His reality-television persona is sometimes remarkably abrasive. His penchant for speaking off-the-cuff has resulted in a series of exaggerations and outright gaffes.
All that said, if he ends up losing in November, it will probably be less because of his own shortcomings than the amazing lengths to which the press has gone in misrepresenting him – painting him by turns weird, erratic, and downright sinister.
What is not in doubt is that if the election were to revolve around fundamental policy proposals (what an innovation!), it would be Trump’s to lose. As Patrick Buchanan has observed, “on the mega-issue, America’s desire for change, and on specific issues, Trump holds something close to a full house.”
On out-of-control immigration and gratuitously counterproductive foreign military adventures, he has seriously wrong-footed Hillary Clinton. He has moreover made remarkable progress in focusing attention on America’s trade disaster. Thanks in large measure to his plain talk, the Clintons have finally been forced into ignominious retreat on their previous commitment to blue-sky globalism. For more on Hillary Clinton’s trade woes, click here.
Trump’s hawkish stance not only packs wide popular appeal but, as I know from more than two decades covering the global economy from a vantage point in Tokyo, it addresses disastrous American policy-making misconceptions going back generations.
The standard Adam Smith/David Ricardo case for free trade, long considered holy writ in Washington, has in the last half century become ludicrously anachronistic.
Smith based his intellectual edifice on the rather pedestrian observation that rainy England was good at raising sheep, while sunny Portugal excelled in growing grapes. What could be more reasonable than for England to trade its wool for Portugal’s wine? But, while Smith’s case is a charming insight into eighteenth century simplicities, the fact is that climate-based agricultural endowments have long since ceased to play a decisive role in First World trade. Today the key factor is advanced manufacturing. By comparison, not only is agriculture a negligible force but, as I documented in a book some years ago, even such advanced service industries as computer software are disappointing exporters.
For nations intent on improving their manufacturing prowess (and, by extension, their standing in the world incomes league table), a key gambit is to manipulate the global trading system. Japan and Germany were the early leaders in intelligent mercantilism but in recent years the most consequential exemplar has been China.
In theory China should be a great market for, for instance, the U.S. auto industry – and it is, sort of. The Detroit companies have been told that while their American-made products are not welcome, they can still make money in China provided only they manufacture there AND bring their most advanced production know-how.
While such an arrangement may promise good short-term profits (nicely fattening up those notorious executive stock options), the trade-deficit-plagued American economy is immediately deprived of badly needed exports. Meanwhile the long-term implications are devastating. In industry after industry, leading American corporations have been induced not only to move jobs to China but to transfer their most advanced production technology. In many cases moreover, almost as soon as a U.S. company has transferred its production secrets to a Chinese subsidiary, these “migrate” to rising Chinese competitors. Precisely the sort of competitively crucial technology that in an earlier era ensured that American workers were not only by far the world’s most productive but the world’s best paid have been served up on a silver salver to America’s most formidable power rival.
Corporate America’s Chinese subsidiaries moreover are expected almost from the get-go to export. In the early days they sell mainly to Africa and Southern Asia but then, as they approach state-of-the-art quality control, they come under increasing pressure to export even to the United States – with all that that implies for the job security of the very American workers and engineers who developed the advanced production know-how in the first place.
Almost alone in corporate America, the Detroit companies have hitherto baulked at shipping their Chinese-made products back to the United States but their resolve is weakening. Already General Motors has announced that later this year it will begin selling Chinese-made Buicks in the American, European, and Canadian markets. It is the thin end of what may prove to be a very large wedge.
Naturally all this has gone unnoticed in such reflexively anti-Trump media as the Washington Post. (A good account, however, is available at the pro-Trump website, Breitbart.com.)
For the mainstream press, the big nation-defining issues count as nothing compared to Trump’s personal peccadillos, real or, far too often, imagined.
This brings us back to Kovaleski. Did Trump really mean to mock a handicapped person’s disability? On any fair assessment, the answer is clearly No. As the Catholics 4 Trump website has documented, the media have suppressed vital exonerating evidence.
The truth is that Trump’s frenetic performance bore no resemblance to the rigid look of arthrogryposis victims. Pointing out that Kovaleski conducted no on-camera interviews in the immediate wake of the Trump performance, Catholics 4 Trump has commented:
Shouldn’t the media have been chomping at the bit to get Kovaleski in front of their cameras to embarrass Trump and prove to the world Trump was clearly mocking his disability? If the media had a legitimate story, that is exactly what they would have done and we all know it. But the media couldn’t put Kovaleski in front of a camera or they’d have no story…..But, if they showed video of Trump labeled “Trump Mocks Disabled Reporter,” then put up a still shot of Kovaleski, they knew you, the viewer, would assume Kovaleski’s disability must make his arms move without control.
According to Catholics 4 Trump, in the same speech in which he presented his Kovaleski cameo, Trump acted out similar histrionics to portray a flustered U.S. general. Meanwhile, on another occasion, he used the same wildly flapping hand motions to lampoon Ted Cruz’s rationalizations on waterboarding. Thus as neither the flustered general nor Ted Cruz are known to be physically handicapped, we have little reason to assume that Trump’s Kovaleski routine represented anything other than an admittedly eccentric portrayal of someone prevaricating under political pressure.
Perhaps the ultimate smoking gun in all this is the behavior of the Washington Post. On August 10, it published a particularly one-sided account by Callum Borchers. When someone used the reader comments section to reference the alternative Catholics 4 Trump explanation, the links were deleted almost immediately. As Catholics 4 Trump pointed out, the Post’s hidden agenda suddenly stood revealed for all to see:
This demonstrates that the Washington Post is aware of evidence existing that contradicts their conclusions, and that they are willfully attempting to conceal it from their readers. If Borchers and WaPo were honest and truly wanted to report ALL of the evidence for and against and let the readers decide, they would have to include the video of Kovaleski and the video of Trump impersonating a flustered General and a flustered Cruz. Any objective report would include both evidence for and against a certain interpretation of the Trump video.
What are we to make of the various other press controversies that have increasingly dogged the Trumpmobile? For the most part, not much.
One recurring controversy concerns how rich Trump really is. The suggestion is that his net worth is way short of the $10 billion he claims.
He has come in for particular flak from the author Timothy O’Brien, who a decade ago pronounced him worth “$250 million tops.” Although O’Brien continues to pop up regularly in places like the Washington Post and Bloomberg, his methodology has been faulted by Forbes magazine, which, of course, has long been the ultimate authority in such matters.
What can be said for sure is that even the best informed and most impartial calculation can only be tentative. The fact is that the Trump business is private and thus not subject to daily stock market assessment.
There is moreover a special complication almost unique to the Trump business — the value of his brand. In Trump’s own mind, he seems to think of himself as a latter-day Cesar Ritz – albeit he projects less an image of five-star discretion as high-rolling hedonism. That the brand is a considerable asset, however, is obvious from the fact that he franchises it to, among others, independent real-estate developers. That said, it is an intangible whose value moves up and down in the same elevator as The Donald’s personal standing in global esteem.
All that said, in a major assessment last year, Forbes editor Randall Lane put Trump’s net worth at $4.5 billion. Although that is way short of Trump’s own estimate, it still bespeaks world class business acumen.
Another controversy concerns the country of origin of Trump campaign paraphernalia. After he disclosed that his ties were made in China, his criticism of America’s huge bilateral trade deficit with China was denounced as hypocrisy.
Again there is less here than meets the eye. It is surely not unprincipled for someone to argue for laws to be changed even while in the meantime he or she continues to benefit from the status quo.
Warren Buffett, for instance, has often suggested that tax rates should be raised for plutocrats like himself. In the meantime, however, he continues to pay lower rates than many of his junior staff and nobody calls him a hypocrite. By the same token, many Ivy League-educated journalists privately criticize the legacy system under which their children and the children of other graduates of top universities enjoy preferential treatment in admissions. Few if any such parents, however, would stand in the way of their own children cashing in on the system. Should they?
Perhaps Trump’s most egregious experience of press misrepresentation was sparked when he archly urged Russia to hack into Clinton’s personal server to discover her missing emails. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” he said. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press!”
This was sarcasm laid on with a trowel but the press, of course, wasn’t buying it. Yet it is not as if sarcasm is new to American politics. No less a figure than Abraham Lincoln had a famously sarcastic tongue and the press laughed along with him. When someone complained of Ulysses Grant’s drinking, for instance, Lincoln rushed to the defense of the Union’s most successful general. “Can you tell me where he gets his whiskey,” Lincoln asked. “Because, if I can only find out, I will send a barrel of this wonderful whiskey to every general in the army.”
Then there was Harry Truman, the man who declared himself in search of a one-handed economist. When he was not making fun of dismal scientists, he found plenty of other opportunities for caustic wit. After he was presented with the Chicago Tribune’s front page saying “Dewey Defeats Truman,” for instance, he commented: “I knew I should have campaigned harder!”
As for Trump, his wit is clearly a major draw with the ordinary voters who flock to his meetings. Yet little of it is ever recycled in the press. In the case of the Russia hacking joke indeed, many commentators were so humorless as to mutter darkly about a threat to national security. At Slate, Osita Nwanevu interviewed a lawyer to see what could be done to arraign Trump on treason charges. (The answer was nothing.) Meanwhile at Politico, Nahal Toosi and Seung Min Kim reported that Trump’s crack had “shocked, flabbergasted, and appalled lawmakers and national security experts across the political spectrum.” They quoted Philip Reiner, a former national security official in the Obama administration, describing Trump as a “scumbag animal.” Reiner went on to comment: “Hacking email is a criminal activity. And he’s asked a foreign government – a murderous, repressive regime – to attack not just one of our citizens but the Democratic presidential candidate? Of course it’s a national security threat.”
Countless other examples could be cited of how the press has piled on in ways that clearly make a mockery of claims to fairness. All this is not to suggest that Trump hasn’t made many unforced errors. His handling of the Khizr Khan affair in particular played right into the press’s agenda. As Khan had lost a son in Iraq, his taunts should have been ignored. By challenging Khan, Trump was charging the cape, not the matador. The matador, of course, was Hillary, and she was actually highly exposed. Trump, after all, could have simply confined his riposte to the fact that but for her vote, and the votes of other Senators, the United States would never have entered Iraq, and Khan’s unfortunate son would still be alive.
Where does Trump go from here? Although it is probably too late to get the press to fall into line in observing traditional standards of fairness, Trump can make it harder for the press to deliver cheap shots.
He needs to stake out the high ground and get a serious policy discussion going. The debates should help but the first one is still more than a month away. In the meantime one strategy would be to compile detailed, authoritative reports on trade, immigration, and other key issues. While such reports would not reach everyone, in these days of the internet they would find a useful readership among an influential, if no doubt relatively small, cadre of thoughtful constituents. They could thus work indirectly but powerfully to change the tone of the campaign. Certainly such an initiative would be hard for the mainstream press simply to ignore – and even harder completely to misrepresent.
Eamonn Fingleton is the author of In the Jaws of the Dragon: America’s Fate in the Coming Era of Chinese Hegemony . He interviewed Trump for Forbes magazine in 1982.
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Mr Fingleton, this was a generally good apart from the references to Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Adam Smith did not support Free Trade. He was one of his Majesty’s Commissioners for Custom and Excise for the last 10 years of his life. Free Trade supporter ? Rubbish.
My old Prof, A J Youngson ( Economic History, Edinburgh University, and an authority on C18th Scotland ) thought that Smith’s thought merely contended for the internal free market – that is, within the United Kingdom. Nothing more. I must agree with him.
Ricardo was the man who wrote the stuff about English wool and Portuguese wine and propounded the Theory of Comparative Advantage. But Britain was barely industrialised at the time and the Theory has been logically dismantled since.
However, generations of English-speaking Economics students have been taught that the Theory of Comparative Advantage is not just a theory ( and a discredited theory at that ) but is one of the cornerstones of Economics, never disproved until this day. Also nearly all Economics graduates know SFA about history especially economic history.
Even an opponent of Neoliberalism like Fingleton can make those gross errors because he did not study Economic History thoroughly. How much worse is the ignorance of your average economics “professional.”
—–What is not in doubt is that if the election were to revolve around fundamental policy proposals (what an innovation!), it would be Trump’s to lose. As Patrick Buchanan has observed, “on the mega-issue, America’s desire for change, and on specific issues, Trump holds something close to a full house.”—–
I would agree… but not entirely.
Oftentimes, what people say they want isn’t what they really want or what they’re willing to suffer the consequences for.
Even policy proposals with long-term benefits have disruptive consequences, at least for awhile.
Most American want financial reform and etc, but are they really willing to support someone who will go after Wall Street? It may shock the market, and they will suffer in falling stock prices.
Many Americans want an end to illegal immigration, but they must know illegals do provide cheap labor that keep American businesses running, and that means those businesses will pay taxes that will provide benefits. Also, with white population growth not being very robust, many housing units will go empty or turn into havens for Negroes unless immigrants come and serve as buffer. If old white folks die off and leave empty houses, would you rather have immigrants fill them or Negroes?
Many Americans are skeptical of ‘free trade’ and globalism, but as Walmart shoppers, they must know so much of the economy is now entwined with globalist contract and such. And if this state of affairs is disrupted, it may be good for US in the long run, but there will be short-term pain, even severe pain. And many businesses do business with those involved heavily in globalism. There are lots of indirect connections even among non-globalist companies.
It’s like a junkie will say he likes the idea of being drug-free and etc. but when it comes to actual process of weaning himself of the drug, he is reluctant to take the plunge.
It’s like a fatty will say he likes the idea of exercising and losing weight, but when push comes to shove, he would rather pig out than hit the gym and break a sweat.
Habits and patterns are hard to break. Maybe globalism got Americans addicted to something very ungood and maybe they realize they need to break out of it… and many say so, but when push comes to shove, they shrivel from what they should do.
It’s like the guys in ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST would like to agree with McMurphy and watch the World Series, but they are so accustomed to Nurse Ratched’s schedule and ways that they don’t want to break out of the pattern, if only to avoid the wrath of Ratched.
It’s also like HIGH NOON. So many townsfolk know what should be done about Frank Miller… They all say so, but when push comes to shove, they don’t want to take a chance.
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One of my degrees is in economics, so that must be the reason for my ignorance … can you enlighten me by providing the meaning of SFA?
Adam Smith wasn’t a Free Trader. No one claimed that he was one during his lifetime. It was well into the Victorian period that claims were made that he was a Free trader. However, generations of Anglo-American Economics students have been fed this falsehood and unthinkingly regurgitate this lie in essays and later in life. Even Fingleton, admirable in his opposition to the poison of Neoliberalism, can’t help but repeat this lie, something that he heard as a student 50 years ago and never questioned.
The greatest Economist who ever lived did not support Free Trade. By his actions and writings, he supported tariffs and customs barriers, even if, like the Navigation Acts, they caused friction with American Colonists.
SFA may mean Scottish Football Association, or Sweet Fanny Adams, but in this context means Sweet F*** All, which sadly sums up the historical knowledge of nearly all economists I had dealings with.
Long term, Free Trade did not benefit Britain in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. The First World War forced it back to tariffs and quotas. Likewise, America must return to tariffs before there is total economic collapse. Trump grasps this fact, one reason why the transnational financial class hate him.
JUST STOP PRINTING MONEY, FFS! Paying with promises to fleece future taxpayers has its drawbacks on CURRENT taxpayers.
As for “badly needed exports” you need to have something that people abroad want to buy, right? Would be nice to work on that. And I don’t mean F-35s.
I would like to hear more about that. Argumentation in economics has always been a bit wishy-washy at the best of times, so the “logical” is likely to be a bit of overselling…
The best short refutation is Paul Craig Roberts’ article, “Clarifications on the Case for Free Trade” at Mises Institute, Mises Daily Articles, 01/10/2004.
In order for Comparative Advantage to benefit all parties, capital and labour ( as factors of production ) must be nationally mobile, but internationally immobile, a point emphasized by Ricardo himself. If these conditions don’t apply, the theory is vitiated.
And so it is today. Capital and labour ( along with other factors of production ) are internationally mobile, often very so. Production and servicing is concentrated in countries with an Absolute Advantage in Trade ( cheap labour countries ). There are no benefits from Comparative Advantage because it doesn’t apply.
Americans won’t buy American made Buicks. They’ll be even less inclined to buy Chinese made Buicks.
China seems to be the only place in the world where Buick is a popular and prestigious brand. It’s basically a dead brand in the US.
Thought for a minute you were going to toss out Soft Furry Animals.
In all seriousness, you cannot say that free trade is discredited because, like it or not, it is the accepted orthodoxy of our “best and brightest.” I have always heard that free trade benefits the whole society, and you will hear that on every business news channel and even from talking heads like Mark Levin, who has been ragging on Trump for his Protectionist bent and using Milton Friedman and the “example” of Smoot-Hawley and the Great Depression as his sledgehammer to “educate” his audience on the dangers of protectionism and the virtues of free trade.
Yes, I will admit that free-trade might actually help an economy to run closer to peak efficiency, but I don’t run my aircraft engine at peak efficiency because I don’t want to burn it up. In real life, people don’t automatically retrain themselves to higher-order levels of skills and abilities, and so we’ve watched a hundred million people drop out of the US workforce as they were pushed out of the lower rungs of the workforce because they could be replaced with cheaper imported labor or by outsourcing their jobs abroad. Yes, the savings helped the US to appear to function at a higher level of output, but the benefits accrued only to the top 10%, and that tranche is being whittled down to the top 1% as they figure out how to jettison the other 9% to further line their own pockets.
There was a point in the Brexit debate, BTW, where the government announced that Brexit would cost every family something like £5k a year in income. That was a misrepresentation, of course, because they took the worst-case GDP projection and divided it by the total count of families in the UK. The proles were having none of it, since they have experienced all income gains going to the top 10%. It would appear that propaganda is losing out to experience, but it is still a tough battle to argue against orthodoxy.
So for you and me, free trade might be discredited, but we are clearly in the minority of what is taken to be informed opinion.
You are right about its influence on “informed” opinion.
Free Trade does not benefit labour in more expensive countries because the necessary conditions for Comparative Advantage do not apply.
But Anglo-American Economics Departments have been presenting it as a universally beneficial policy of unimpeachable logic. They have been doing so for generations now. Most students just accept it unquestioningly. It is the Big Lie of economic thought. Dr Goebbels would be proud
The parable of comparative advantage, that of cloth and wine had another angle as I read recently. Britain at the time of Ricardo emerged as a protector of sorts of the Portuguese due to the European situation. She then took full advantage of this to open up Portuguese colonies such as Brazil to British trading interests.
The hapless Portuguese ended up losing twice; firstly by giving up manufacturing of cloth which was rapidly mechanising at that time for the supposed advantage of a labour intensive wine-making industry and secondly in giving up market access to her colonies.
Why I think the debates will be crucial, the media will be limited in their ability to manipulate them. Trump can present his policies, and do so with more charisma. He should also challenge the disabled fraud the media push.
Hopefully his campaign will destroy what little is left of the media’s credibility.
While I hope for greater awareness and accountability by the media, I am also reminded that they by ink by the barrel. Some serious public shaming would be in order for them.
The short-term-pain, long-term-gain game has been underway in Argentina since last year’s elections voted out the failed economic policies of Hillary-esque departing president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. For reasons particular to Argentina, it may prove to be too little too late, but the voters were willing to give it a try. One hopes the yanquis will do the same and give Trump a shot at turning the country around even if it falls short of the full 180º.
The press and mass media in general are too far gone to the dark side of propagandists in service to Mammon to be redeemed. Only on the internet is there any semblance of a free press. Mr. F’s “traditional standards of fairness” left the room quite some time ago.
For my daily dose of humor, I look up the daily Trump-bashing headlines in the New York Times. Of course, these appear right next to the ‘Presidential Forecast: Chance of Winning’. Today it is at 90 per cent for Clinton.
– Why would the NYT waste Carlos Slim’s money on trashing a candidate whose chance of winning is 10 per cent? Shouldn’t they be busy with the Clinton coronation?
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– Why is Adam Smith’s book ‘The Theory of Moral Sentiments’ always ignored? Is there a particular reason?
Pardon my glaring ignorance, but how can anyone claim that free trade has been discredited?
When and where has free trade has ever existed on any substantial scale since the time of robber bands including the large organized variety called government? Thus the only trade we know is the unfree variety, so the only thing that could have been truly discredited by experience is that.
On the other hand, whether trade is free or unfree, there will probably always be a few goons who manage to mess to mess it all up for the rest of us.
“In industry after industry, leading American corporations have been induced not only to move jobs to China but to transfer their most advanced production technology. ”
Exactly so. While we deplore the loss of jobs attendant on this action we hardly hear about the loss of manufacturing expertise and the people who have that expertise. It would take at least a decade for US manufacturers to train the massive numbers of engineers, technicians, managers and supervisors needed to staff all of the new factories. Right now these people hardly exist any more other than in strategic industries.
Mind you, too, even at the height of US manufacturing activity (in the sixties) Japan was slowly but surely reinventing how it should be done and competing less and less on price and more and more on quality. USA has always suffered from short-term thinking – often not too far beyond the next quarter. “Manufacturing” has never really been considered as a strategic endeavor – on a level with Marketing and R&D.
The media wants Clinton because Clinton is a Zionists as is the media. The problems with America begin and end with the corruption within our media. Thanks to Reagan and Clinton the media was allowed to consolidate. Thanks to the consolidation just a few Zionist Jews/globalists, can run the media.
On issues like immigration, war and financial policy the media is united, reading from the same script. Then on issues like gay marriage, guns, racism, feminism, the media each take diametrically opposite positions in order to push social division.
When you listen to the reports about the media in Germany, in Britten during the “Britex vote”, they all follow the same talking points, if you were for national sovereignty you were a “racist/xenophobe, isolationist, nationalist”, as if those are bad things.
Everyone is a bit racist, but it only white are not permitted this vice, I never hear the media criticize Jews for their obviously racist policies, yet when Trump suggests building a wall, as Israel has, the same media that is blind to israel’s over racism, attacks an Trump because he is getting in the way of globalists. I could go on, but I think the message is obvious, we are being manipulated by a Zionist cult that wishes to destroy western civilization.
Goebbels when speaking of The Big Lie was referring to the Zionist controlled press and their endless lies.
Get your facts straight.
What ever you wish to call it, but in today’s vernacular, “free trade”, is anything the globalists put forth that removes national sovereignty and worker/environmental protections, and increases corporate profits.
In a world where the elite use their media to establish false narrative to push an agenda, we have little choice but to use their nomenclature. So as fee trade exists among the globalists, it is indeed been discredited, by any relevant measure.
Alt Right=Native Born White American race revolt against the Democratic Party which is waging a violent race war against Native Born White American Males
True, but you can bet, the minute the debate is over, scores of media talking heads will be screaming “HILLARY WON THAT DEBATE!”.
But what we may be seeing is the awakening of the American people to the corruption of the media. Thanks to a long election season and the media overt bashing of Trump and fawning for Clinton, people have time to process what they are seeing. The media may be over playing their hand, and at last people are able to see the truth, they are nothing more than propaganda outlets for the elites.
Trump like the rest of American political leaders has no balls to tell the truth about 9/11 due to fear of Jewish-control press and FBI. They, with the exception of few, repeat the same official lies to divert public attention from Israel and local Zionists’ involvement in the 9/11.
Recently, Russian REN-TV aired a new short film blaming Jews for committing the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.
The film is claimed to be an updated version of a 2012 film which blamed Jews for committing various disasters such as the Sinking of the Titanic, a Rockefeller-Morgan conspiracy in order to create an international crisis, Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986 (here), and the 9/11.
The film claims that Muslim Arabs were unjustly blamed for the September 11, 2001 attacks. Watch below an interview with Zionist prime minister Ehud Barak below showing the pre-knowledge of what is going to happen to Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Iran in the future.
The commentators said the film was made to prove what is happening in the world today is exactly as predicted in the notorious The Protocols of the Elders of Zion published in Russia in 1903, which purports to be the leaked master plan for Jewish world domination.
https://rehmat1.com/2016/08/23/russian-tv-jews-did-911/
Bad comparison. Fernández was opposed to Wall Street; Hellary’s for it.
Argentina has a lot of smoke and mirrors at work: biggest landowner is George Soros, CFK was married to a former prez, was/is thoroughly corrupt, a megalomaniac, a predatory “advocate” of the poor, pro all the usual lefty lunacy, pro massive public debt and on and on. There were/are differences, sure, but on balance I still maintain the similarities outweigh the differences and stand by the comparison.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments is comparatively ignored in Britain and North America because Economists, being historically ignorant – see previous, are generally unaware that Smith is a major Moral Philosopher as well as an Economist. If you said ” David Hume ” to them, they would probably think it was a brand of Whisky.
Fortunately, things are much better elsewhere. In Japan, for instance, the book is a standard reading text for sixth-formers ( 18 year olds ), not only because it is interesting in itself, but to prepare students for questions of a philosophical nature later in their studies.
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I hope that isn’t about the false claims made about CO2, global warming … now switched to ‘climate change’.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/
Your propaganda history is very weak.
“Dr. Goebbels” was referring to the concatenation of MSM owners, advertisers, and financiers who were
a) hellbent on bringing the wrath of the global financial caste down on Germans for wanting their own nation for their own people and
b) jealous of the genomic capacity to create what Germans created in just a few years in the 1930s after being brutalized with war, disease, and famine then humiliated with politics.
“The Big Lie” wasn’t what he said. It was the systematic, orchestrated demonization of Germans (Huns!) dating back to the 19-teens period of national currency takeovers and subsequent rigging of national economies to crash, driving them into the arms of the central bankers. Then punishing viciously anyone who resisted.
This is not radical, fringe, or contested. I’m not sure why people ostensibly in “alternative” circles continue to parrot the programming inflicted by big media about Germany in the 20th century…but that is precisely the power of this mind control.
Precisely, and this–THIS–is The Big Lie today as it was in Goebbels’ time.
As Churchill said at one point, Germany’s mistake was quickly creating the conditions for massive turnaround after Versailles…and enviable prosperity…then not allowing others to come in and carve off their pounds of fleisch. Keeping the wealth for themselves, reinvesting it in their own people.
They call Trump Hitler as a way of trying to trigger the propaganda-programmed reactions they’ve surfed to power for the past 70 years.
That the internet has given so many people an advanced education in mass media propaganda techniques, and people are now in open rebellion, is infuriating them. That’s why their bizarre treatment of The Donald continues. At this point, all they have is increasingly hysterical appeals to the large and largely female and nonwhite segment of the electorate that has not yet been red-pilled on the “news,” “public relations,” “advertising,” “opinion,” and related industries.
One last thing. In the 1990s I worked with a bunch of economists. A whole bunch of them saw the disaster of free trade. I worked with them to organize several anti-NAFTA/GTO seminars and conferences in several states.
They all came around to globalism during the Wall St. run-up of the Aughts. How come? Most were untenured, and they wanted tenure. They figured out that THEIR sinecures would be strengthened with globalismo, and further strengthened in direct proportion to the amount of disdain they exercised for members of “labour in more expensive countries.” Their 401(k)s got very fat indeed…and all they had to do was mouth the Big Lies while lying about things like the distribution of IQ or the genomic basis of economics.
Hillary is decrepit. The Neocons are hiding behind her skirts. Republicans who don’t point this out are acting like Grand Old Pussies.
Right wing in the US appropriated Adam Smith just like they appropriated George Orwell. For these reason we do not hear that George Orwell had socialist inclination and that Adam Smith did not really say that greed is good and certainly did not think so.
“The Neocons are hiding behind her skirts. Republicans who don’t point this out are acting like Grand Old Pussies.” – Didn’t it occur to you that Republicans really like neocons and their ideas. Certainly they do not have any other idea that could compete with neocon’s invade the world.
I am glad that you pointed out that the Big Lie today are various economic dogmas.
Does anyone under 60 read the Washington Post or any other newspaper?
Many Republicans support the Neocons, but not all of them. If they have to hide behind a decrepit old woman to find cover then they must be vulnerable.
The standard conspiracy theory about the Titanic is that the sinking was an insurance scam by the White Star Line.
Perhaps you are thinking of the sinking of the Liusitiania?
It means sweet fanny adams.
The main reason for American manufacturing companies to infiltrate foreign lands is cheap labor and lack of accountability. That’s why big American corporations have set-up their covert operations in China, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, etc.
The world’s worst disaster at Union Carbide in Bhopal, and the recent garment factory fire in Bangladesh.
Bhopal made the world news on December 2, 1984 when a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal began leaking 27 tons of poisonous gas methyl isocynate. The gas spread to the populated areas and killed more than 25,000 people so far.
Bhopal has the unique place in Muslim history of women power. Its last three rulers happened to be women.
https://rehmat1.com/2015/07/19/bhopal-bjps-killing-fields/
SFA = Sweet F*CK All
I’m fiftyish. Never read WaPo and I stopped subscribing to the NYT in 2002. I read the news online now, mostly the foreign press and local papers. Our mainstream media these days is a pitiful joke.
You are right about Smith being appropriated by various groups. The Neocons are keen on him because Free Trade is one of the bases of their Invite the World-Invade the World “philosophy.”
The Globalists are also keen on him because Free Trade is the basis of their world view.
The Real Historical Smith was not in favour of external free trade, but these groups are either ignorant of this or think they can pull the wool over the public’s eyes.
The most important group of all is the financialists. The term capitalism was not coined til after Smith’s death ( 1790 ) Smith did not use the term. Originally, a capitalist was a financier who loaned money to manufacturers. Its modern meaning did not arise until well into the 19th Century.
Since WWII these financialists, formerly capitalists, have taken over many Western economies with devastating results. Their mantra is Free Movement of Money. Also, They are Too Big to Fail. Everyone ” knows ” Adam Smith formulated these policies.
Yes, it’s shocking how many in the US don’t realize that Orwell was a life-long socialist who even fought alongside them in the Spanish Civil War. I myself once thought that Adam Smith was a free-trader until I read The Wealth of Nations for myself.
Really, is that why American manufacturing produced more goods last year than at any time in history?
By some measures American manufacturing has doubled in the last 20 years, but that has been from a very low base.
Since 1993, the trade deficit ( unadjusted for inflation ) is over $US 8 trillion. In 2015, not the worst year by any means, the total trade deficit was $531.5 bn. The deficit in oil was $180, but in manufactured goods some $580 bn.
Although US manufacturing may have improved somewhat, it is totally incapable of meeting domestic demand. It is like a 3rd World country, not an industrialised country. Whole sectors of American industry have gone. Even with President Trump’s sensible policies, reviving them will be difficult.
In complete agreement! I keep asking myself, “WHY” if Trump is soooooo pathetically NEVER getting the Black vote, why the unrelenting canon fodder of calling him, his supporters, and by default, Republicans, and Conservative/Christians RACISTS???
The desperation oozes like a bag of taffy left on the dashboard of a car, in Arizona, in August!
Too funny!
It was not Arabs dancing in New Jersey, it was Jews.
http://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=123885&page=1
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/fiveisraelis.html
http://www.todayscatholicworld.com/mossad-agents-911.htm
Funny how quickly that vanished down the memory hole.
because hamburger flipping has been redefined as “manufacturing”
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