1 week Ago By Noble Philip
“When your neighbour’s house is on fire, wet yours!” is an excellent Trinidadian proverb which is applicable now. We have been consumed with the goings-on about succession planning cum election preparation in the People’s National Movement. Not forgotten are the troubles of the Dissident Five, who have been sidelined after the United National Congress internal election.
What can we learn from the landslide victory in the US election? “This election was a CAT scan on the American people, and as difficult as it is to say, as hard as it is to name, what it revealed, at least in part, is a frightening affinity for a man of borderless corruption,” said Peter H Wehner, a former strategic adviser to President George W Bush and vocal critic of Mr Trump. “Donald Trump is no longer an aberration; he is normative.” (The New York Times (NYT), November 6, 2024.
) We, too, face this same challenge: are our politicians above the law? Do and will we excuse them because they are “our felons”? Would we throw out all sense of decency to win an election and to rub the noses of our opposition into the earth? We accept their aberrations as “normal” because they are our party leaders! The critical point is that Donald Trump’s voter base did not materially change from the 2020 outing. Kamala Harris dropped approximately 18 million votes from the historic Biden-Harris victory. When we fail to vote, we cede control to others.
A lesson for us here at home. Enabled by the US Supreme Court case known as the Citizens United decision, the bags of campaign financing money turned into billions of dollars. At an April 11 dinner at his Florida home, Trump asked oil executives for $1 billion for his campaign in exchange for lower taxes and less regulation.
“They are paying up for this $1 billion request that Donald Trump made because he has promised to do everything in his power to protect their profits,” said Alex Witt, a senior adviser on oil and gas for Climate Power. Who pays for this? We, in the Caribbean, do. Climate change concerns have been jettisoned.
We face the perils of hotter temperatures and rising sea levels. Our campaign finance laws are nonexistent. Imagine what takes place.
Enter the technology guys. We know about Elon Musk and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, but do we know that the world’s top ten wealthiest guys saw their worth increase by $64 billion the day after the election? (Bloomberg, November 7, 2024.) Remember that Peter Thiel spent $15 million to help JD Vance win a Senate seat.
Musk warned that Trump’s plans will bring “temporary hardship”. (Yahoo Finance, October 30, 2024.) Bill Stern, a former endorser of Donald Trump, once said, “Our elections are free; it’s in the results where we eventually pay.
” The poor will vote, but it is the rich that benefit. It’s a massive con game! Trump, as politicians do, exploited both ends. The scary part lies ahead.
The wonder of artificial intelligence (AI) is actually a replay of colonialism. We believe that an AI product is spontaneously created. It is not.
One hour of video data requires 800 human hours of data annotation! (Guardian, July 6, 2024.) Those hours are paid at a meagre wage. The work is repetitive.
It is the dung heap of AI innovation. Big tech feeds off the physical and intellectual work of human beings. Musk and Microsoft, aka Open AI, will win.
We lose. Trump promised everything to everyone. Where did inflation come from? He vowed to slay it even though the data showed it was at its lowest recently.
(NBC, October 10, 2024.) The real-life experiences did not match the data. Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize winner, said, “If Donald Trump wins the election, the main reason will surely be that a majority of voters believe that America’s economy is in bad shape.
” (NYT, May 23, 2024.) The economy is not doing badly, but the people feel badly. The US was the best-performing economy after the pandemic.
But the narrative about milk and gas stuck. Trump promised peace to the US Arabs and the Jews. They believed him.
Yet, he was telling Netanyahu to do what he needed to do. (Times of Israel, October 20, 2024.) Are such discussions at odds with the official position of patriotism? They remind us of Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter’s hostage crisis (NYT, March 18, 2023.
) Do we see this behaviour locally? Don’t we have the same problem of narrative versus reality? What is the role of the media? Bezos represents the most crass example. No endorsement by The Washington Post, but posted on X, “Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th President on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory. No nation has bigger opportunities.
Wishing @realDonaldTrump all success in leading and uniting the America we all love.” Can we trust the media to call things right? They who “sane-washed” his speeches? The parallels are striking. Actions have consequences.
Stay tuned. —Noble Philip.
