The United States influences the electoral processes and political agendas in 81 different nations, officially. Certainly Russia influences many more than that; and, well… just about everybody plays this game. And that’s just the part of this global industry that we know about.
Powerful nations use military might and permanent trade advantages as the ultimate sources of influence.
Influence may be the world’s biggest commodity. The U.S. would seem to live off it: If we can’t make the steel and aluminum materials to build our cars, we “level the playing field,” with taxes and tariffs. We don’t build something better; we just use our power, our influence, to get ourselves back into the game. If we can’t build the microchips that we must have to enable progress, then we have India and China do it at a tremendous disadvantage, with growth-killing economic damage the result in China, and workers living on starvation wages in India. We damage our most important trading and producing partners, and we bully and disrespect them publicly; yet imagine ourselves immortal in the world of international trade. But, for all our best efforts (ha, ha) we have not revived our steel industry, or taken the lead in high-tech alloy production that we must have to reach the next level.
We control shipping worldwide, and use that to profit endlessly, even from the poorest and most desperate people in the hemisphere; and our tariffs control prices worldwide. And the U.S. based lobbying industry uses the billions of dollars available to the owners of mega-corporations to influence policy and legislation to give even more to the owners, and kill accountability to the customer, while erasing the entire history of ethics.
The U.S. doesn’t even have to worry about poor production or invention; if we fail, we can always make it up in taxes and tariffs; or of course, we can always just lie.
Speaking of: Trump dreams of controlling all of this. He would, and possibly may, soon decide the candidates – and the winners – of every national level race, everywhere! You think I’m giving him too much credit – he’s already doing it!
Trump says that whatever he does is okay if he believed when he did it that it was in the nation’s best interest. He can believe whatever he wants, but he can’t re-write the laws as he goes along to achieve it – no more than any other man.
Trump would be the world’s chief election fixer. We never knew he had so many talents.
Trump says he has ‘absolute right’ to ask ‘other Countries’ to investigate corruption
https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/03/politics/trump-tweet-investigate-corruption-absolute-right/index.html
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