#BTColumn – The Donald trumped them

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by this author are their own and do not represent the official position of the Barbados Today.

by Peter Webster

“If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes politics.” – Anon

“As a rule, the most dangerous ideas (to the rulers) are not the ones that divide people but those on which the people agree.” –  Stephen Vizenczey

“Divide and rule in politics and sociology is gaining and maintaining power by breaking up larger concentrations of power into pieces that individually have less power than the one implementing the strategy.” – Wikipedia

Wow! He may have lost, but the “Donald” trumped them again. The predicted “Biden election by a landslide” did not materialise and the election actually went “down to the wire” leaving almost 50 per cent of the American public frighteningly dissatisfied but expected to “grin and bear it” Why?

The sad part of it is that the real lesson has not been recognised far less learnt. None of the pollsters or political analysts were seen to have a clue as to the cause. “Trump is divisive” trumpeted the hypocritical socialists who have promoted diversity.

Pray, tell me how you can get a cohesive yet diverse society with its many languages and cultures – it is a non sequitur. These socialists are the same people who promote equity while their socialist elite are more equal than anyone else and often corrupt.

It is these socialists who want to scrap the electoral college system in America that would totally ignore
the relative contribution of the differing States to the American economy.

The founding fathers had a good reason for the electoral college system, which has helped to bind the States to the Union. If you want Calexit, Texit and New Yexit scrap
that system.

The real division in America is not a Trump division but has always been the huge divide between the rural people (many of whom are practicing Christians) who feed the American Nation and the urban/suburban residents who exploit the rural producers in repayment.

There are American “whites” on both sides of that divide in equal proportions. A divide that urgently needs bridging, but no one seems to have the capacity far less the motive to do so.

Traditionally, the rural people are buffeted between a rock and a hard place. They are gouged by the input suppliers, must deal with the elemental droughts, floods, pest and diseases (including the thieves who sell their stolen produce in the public markets or along the public road side with impunity) and the producers must then accept a farm-gate price from the marketers that is less than a third of the market price.

The socialist bureaucrats of the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations say that food producers the world over and not all the other members of our societies must “feed the poor”.

All the while, the rural people have few of the social safety nets afforded to the diverse urbanites, few of whom venture outside their communities far less attempt to produce food. Those rural people know full well who have batted for them and who have not. They also know who they only see at election time when their votes are wanted.

It is also interesting to note that this is the exact divide (Rural versus Urban) that occurred in Britain’s Brexit and there are British “whites” on both sides of that divide, in equal proportions.

The socialist bureaucrats in Brussels dispossessed the British fishermen of their resources and markets thereby destroying the multi-billion pound British fishing industry with a stroke of their collective pens in addition to destroying the multi-billion pound British agro- industry with their rules, regulations and biased subsidies.  Then the same bureaucrats naively wondered why the social divide and backlash.

I have often seen that naivety displayed by economists who reasoned if they did something and everything else remained the same then the result would be something that they (the economists) predicted would happen but it never does. Why? Newton’s third Law of Motion translated to social and economic conditions says that “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction” – everything else seldom remains the same.  Round and round we go…

Peter Webster is a retired Portfolio Manager of the Caribbean Development Bank and a former Senior Agricultural Officer in the Ministry of Agriculture.