whatimnothearing.com

There has been a hue and cry from economists that consumers will pay for Trump’s tariffs in the form of higher prices. China does not pay the tariff on Chinese products.

Parenthetically, I note that since the introduction of tariffs on China, the Chinese stock market has been going up, while Wall Street has been going down.

When it comes to small countries, however, the US is waging economic warfare against adversaries who don’t have the power to fight back economically. For example, Trump wanted to fly migrants in US military aircraft into Columbia, and when Columbia refused, Trump slapped a 25% tariff on them. The Columbian president immediately backed down.

So in this case, you can say that Columbia paid for the tariff. This is happening around the world. People tend to think of tariffs on China and big countries, but those threatened tariffs against smaller, more defenseless countries, are economic warfare that results in those countries’ paying (although not monetarily) for the tariffs.

The threat of tariffs in order to secure U.S. military landing rights in Columbia is especially worrying, because it translates an economic threat into a military solution. Suppose, for example, that Trump wanted to build a naval base on a small Caribbean island that sells its bananas to the US. He could say, “If you don’t let us build the naval base, we will not buy your bananas.” Of course the base will be built.

The past decade has seen a deterioration in the world security, where it used to be a rather unwritten law that a big country would not just invade or take over a small country. Probably the Pax Americana had a lot to do with this. But now, Russia dares to try to take over Ukraine. We have Rwandan forces trying to take over parts of the Congo. And, of course, we have Trump threatening to take over Panama or Greenland or even Canada, and he doesn’t rule out a military takeover. Latest is an American takeover of Gaza, in which the Gazans are expelled so that Trump & Co. Can build a ‘Riviera’, complete with a Trump Tower and Trump family-owned resorts. (How about a pork-rib barbecue?)

What can smaller countries do to prevent economic bullying by bigger countries? The only solution I see is in cooperation among small countries. All the banana producers would have to join forces and vow that an economic tariff or boycott of one country would result in tariffs or boycotts against the US from all those countries. It’s hard to see this happening: if the US slaps a tariff on bananas from one small island, the next island might say, “Goodie! Now WE can sell MORE bananas to the US.”

But really now, Trump’s “America First” means “America against the rest of the world.” No cooperation with the UN, the WHO, or with any international agencies. No win-win negotiations. Trump is not just isolating America; he is actually antagonizing the rest of the world, who will before long gang up against Trump. Africa, South America, Asia will side with China in a grand alliance against the US, which will have lost all its allies.

Foreign aid has always had its detractors. Many people feel either, “Why should we be giving aid to those ungrateful shithole countries?”, or else, “USAID is such a bloated and corrupt bureaucracy, it’s just another big, wasteful black hole for tax dollars.”

Well, I want to share my experience working for USAID some years ago in both Haiti and Cambodia, as well as working closely alongside USAID in Côte d’Ivoire. I do not come down fully either pro or con. There is one truth, not always fully realized, that must be pointed out: USAID is an arm of US foreign policy, and its number one goal is to advance American interests. Of course, helping flood victims or building hospitals is a means to that end, but we shouldn’t forget the real end objective, since sometimes helping countries and extending American influence can work at cross purposes.

I worked for USAID in Cambodia to set up what is now the National University of Management. USAID wanted the NUM to be an American-run, American dominated institution, while the Cambodians said, “Wait a minute; NUM is a Cambodian institution.” This led to bitter fighting between the Americans and the Cambodians. The leaders were interested in playing power politics, and many were self-serving, ambitious bureaucrats with little interest in helping Cambodians. It was mostly a game of stroking egos.

On the other hand, the lowly grunts hired to train teachers, set up curriculum, and develop the staff, were dedicated professionals, aiming at establishing a credible university in the midst of the political chaos going on in Cambodia immediately following the fall of the Khmer Rouge and the UNTAC elections. I get a real sense of pride when I see the NUM today – 30 years later – as the premier business university in the country. I feel that our team achieved this despite the political machinations of the big bosses.

I saw the same pattern in Haiti. USAID was intent on currying favor with Haitian officials, and often overlooked corruption and incompetence by those officials. At the same time, I worked with a team of Haitians to develop educational materials in Haitian creole, and they were real professionals who knew what they were doing, and who were dedicated to that goal.

So the pattern is always the same: political egos fighting for power at the top, with dedicated professionals trying to do good. I saw this again in Côte d’Ivoire, working alongside some truly amazing people (and I single out Steve Grant of USAID), who were adroit enough to straddle the sometimes conflicting agendas of power-hungry bureaucrats and local Africans with needs. The key was to adopt a win-win attitude, in which American influence and local development went hand-in-hand.
 

It appears to me that Trump’s dislike of USAID stems from his dislike of win-win solutions. For him, everything is a power play with a winner (himself, he hopes), and a loser (who ends up bending the knee but hating the US). In the tension between doing good and making America a winner, Trump thinks that USAID is doing too much good and not forcing America’s will upon developing countries. He calls USAID officials “radical maniacs”, by which he means “woke people who want to help others.”

In my experience with these two sometimes conflicting objectives, I feel that on balance, USAID has done a lot of good, not only for the developing countries, but also for America’s image as a partner in development. It is this image that Trump wants to destroy; he feels that America must dictate to other countries how to act and bully them into submission. That is what Trump means by ‘respect’, and ‘America first’.

Aristotle: you don’t hear much about him these days, mostly because most of his writings are taken as just plain obvious. You can yell at me for trying to reduce Aristotle’s entire opus to one short parable being bandied about the internet these days: it’s the one about two men in a room arguing about whether it’s raining outside. Aristotle says, “Why don’t you just go to the window and look?”

But what happens when the two Greeks go to the window, and one says, “See? It’s raining,” and the other says, “See? It’s not raining”?

If this disagreement over what the two men see is repeated over time, they will no longer go to the window to look, but will revert to their argument in the closed room.

Versions of this scenario have been occurring regularly for years. “See? Elon Musk was giving a Nazi salute.” “See? Elon Musk was just raising his hand.” “Let’s go back to our closed media to discuss whether Musk is a Nazi or not.”

 Musk: Nazi salute or not?

After January 6, 2020, many people saw the videos of what looked — clearly, to my eyes — like thugs beating up policemen, breaking windows in the Capitol, and smearing feces on the Capitol walls. But no, others saw peaceful tourists, or maybe some FBI provocateurs or Antifa (You don’t hear that word much these days. Did Antifa disappear?)  Trump said there was ‘love in the air’. After four years of seeing that video, the US has retreated into its closed media standoff about whether the Jan. 6 events even happened at all. We know that the evidence wins no arguments.

Across the board, every piece of evidence is denied as either politically biased or AI generated. No one even thinks about looking at evidence anymore. Aristotle has been thrown out the window.

What is replacing Aristotle? I’d say it’s blind adherence to the Great Leader. If Trump says it’s so, then it’s so. The American economy, by all measured accounts, has been the most powerful in the world, with job growth, GDP growth, and even bringing down the Covid-induced inflation. However, Trump told the American electorate that the economy sucked, prices were rising, and that they were miserable. His pronouncements were believed far more widely than the government statistics.

All economic predictions point to higher inflation under Trump’s tariffs, deportation of the labor force, tax cuts for the rich, etc. But when prices go up, Trump will brag about how he has lowered prices, and he will be believed. No one will actually go check whether the price of eggs has gone up or down. After all, a price check would be evidence — not to be taken seriously.

I’m getting bombarded with Facebook posts showing billboards with pro-Trump messages, usually referring to some Golden Age starting on Jan. 20. There are several Facebook pages posting these, but one main one is Next Chapter. Go look for yourselves.

There are two very strange features common to most of these billboards.

First, the photos appear to have been taken outside the U.S. The brand name at the bottom of the billboard seems to be some squiggly language — hard to read because it’s so small, but it looks a bit like Thai. Background shop signs and license plates are also written in these squiggles. It doesn’t look like Cyrilic, which would be my first guess as a Russian hack or bot. The people in the pictures are Caucasians, and one photo has an Eastern-European-looking streetcar.

The second feature is the ubiquitous grammar or spelling mistake. Maybe a misspelled word, like ‘Donold’, or grammar, like ‘is need to’, or even a duplicated or missing word, like ‘like like’. It’s so common, I must conclude that it’s planned and intentional.

Now why would someone intentionally make all those mistakes in English? It’s really a mystery to me, but here are two hypotheses:

A. The bots want to convince the audience that these signs aren’t machine-produced. A machine wouldn’t make all those silly mistakes, would it? Ironically, however, it’s precisely those mistakes that tip you off that a machine IS producing them.
 

B. The bots are tapping into America’s anti-intellectualism. People who get their English right are suspected as being ‘woke’, so these mistakes attempt to show that the messages are coming from uneducated hillbillies, who, as we all know, possess a  knowledge superior to that of those pointy-headed ‘experts’.

Any hints as to where these are coming from? One common Facebook page is Next Chapter, which posts dozens of these billboards. No clue as to where Next Chapter comes from, nor is there any information on the ‘About’ section of the FB page. That in itself is rather suspicious.
 

Not all the messages are pro-Trump. In the past, Russian interference has aimed at sowing discord rather than supporting one particular party. So a sprinkling of anti-Trump signs confirms in my own mind that this is Russian meddling.
 

Note ‘like like’, and more squiggles lower right.

Hamas allowed Israel to destroy Gaza in order to precipitate a wider war. They failed.

From the beginning of the war, Hamas had no chance of defeating Israel. Their only hope was to resist Israel as long as possible. Indeed, their network of tunnels and supply of missiles made it possible to hold out indefinitely, even if above-ground Gaza is reduced to a depopulated wasteland.

I have argued that the over-arching objective of Hamas was to anger surrounding anti-Israel countries into finally eliminating Israel. Using hospitals as military bases was a strategy designed to enrage the world over Israel’s killing of civilians. Hamas was willing to invite Israel to destroy Gaza, along with over 40,000 people, in order to precipitate Hezbollah, Iran, Syria, and others, to gang up on Israel.

For a while, it looked as though this strategy was working. Iran launched hundreds of missiles at Israel, as did Hezbollah. It looked as though an all-out war was inevitable, much to the delight of Hamas.

But then Israel more or less destroyed Hezbollah with its remote-controlled cell-phone bombs and its targeted assassination of Hezbollah leaders. At the same time, Iran showed itself to be a paper tiger when its hundreds of missiles were intercepted and had no effect.

The last straw was the fall of Assad in Syria, followed by Israeli bombing of strategic targets in Syria. Syria was no longer a threat, and Russia was no longer a front-line player, as Putin withdrew resources from Syria in order to fortify his Ukraine actions.

So now, Hamas has nothing to show for its more-than-one-year war with Israel, other than piles of rubble, thousands of dead and civilian casualties, and an economy on the verge of starvation. It is time for Hamas to negotiate. In fact, they had better reach a deal right now, while the Biden administration is at least outwardly sympathetic to the civilian devastation. When Trump becomes President, he will no doubt embolden Israel to pursue their destruction of Gaza to total ruin and genocide.

One possible counter-scenario is that Trump would like to claim credit for ending the war. Details are being worked out now, so that when Trump enters office in January, the deal will be ready to sign, and Trump will portray himself as the great peace-maker. Of course, the month-long delay until the Trump reign will cause a few more thousands of civilian deaths and more destruction and starvation.