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Strategies & Market Trends : The Financial Collapse of 2001 Unwinding -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: elmatador who wrote (1757)1/23/2019 11:16:59 AM
From: Elroy Jetson  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 13801
 
Regardless of what Trump decides, and God knows Trump is one of the planet's worst negotiators, China will still face the same issues with the next American president and will largely face the same negotiators with similar goals.

Their problems began with president Obama and China's leaders thought this new tough stance on IP theft would go away when Obama left, but their problems only multiplied greatly with Trump.

Xi initially thought he had the problem solved with flattery for Trump while visiting Mar-a-Lago, just as Kim Jong Un thought after Trump announced he loved Kim.

But the president, or any new president, is still subject to the same pressure groups in the US refocusing him or her back on to US objectives.

Trump loons call these unchanging American goals "deep state" but, as Trump himself continues too discover, the US president has very little power when he tries to lead America in a direction different from what the majority of Americans want.

There is no Gestapo to force Americans into alignment with the president's goals, only Americans with a vast array of collective powers who force the president into alignment with their goals.

People around the world who are accustomed to dictatorships thought they saw in Trump America's new dictator, but this was a short-lived illusion as the checks and balances built into the US system and the American legal system refocused Trump on what Americans want and how we do things, regardless of Trump's own preferences.



To: elmatador who wrote (1757)1/23/2019 11:35:21 AM
From: Elroy Jetson  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 13801
 
Authoritarian types like flattery and try to mold how the world views them. The Soviet Union long adjusted photos to remove those who had fallen into disfavor and make their latest dictator appear especially heroic. Trump has taken Soviet photo adjustment to absurd new lows.

After enduring decades of jibes and abuse from Americans and in particular "Spy" magazine editor Graydon Carter called him a “short-fingered vulgarian” in 1988, Trump's allegedly short stubby fingers became a national joke in the 1980s and 1990s and Trump is now obsessed by his finger length.

The tech website Gizmodo reported this week that it found at least three retouched photographs on Trump’s social media pages since October, including two in the past few days, in which Trumps's body and face have been slimmed, his face and neck wrinkles tightened, his hair cleaned up — “and in one of the strangest alterations, Trump’s fingers have been made slightly longer.”

Comparing the original photographs to the doctored ones, Gizmodo speculates that Trump aides have been using Photoshop or Facetune and finds it “especially weird that his fingers have been made longer, which might lead one to believe that the president has had some input in these alterations.”

Why the need for Trump to extend himself now? Perhaps it’s involuntary. Pinocchio’s nose grows when he lies; Trump’s fingers might do the same. Or maybe the digitally altered digits reflect the broader state of Trump’s truthfulness. As things worsen for Trump — legal troubles, Democrats taking the House, the wavering economy and administration chaos — he has deployed ever more flimflam. Glenn Kessler’s Post fact-checking team this week reported that the president’s production of false or misleading claims has nearly tripled, to a rate of 16.5 per day in his second year from 5.9 during his first year. The 82 days on which Trump did not publicly declare a falsehood “were often days when the president golfed.”

Facetune, then, is a metaphor for Trump’s presidency. He created the illusion of a border crisis. He created the illusion of economic success. He created the illusion of a tax cut for the middle class. He’s trying to create the illusion that others are to blame for the shutdown. And now his team is creating actual illusions by posting doctored images of him (even as he accuses the media of being “fake”).