General Chat

Not far from our ancient house in a French village is this place (where we eat and party when in the money)

http://moulindefourges.com/en/

It is also a favorite of the Clintons. When they decide to eat there their party prefers normal life to go on for everybody else so far as possible - which means a heavy duty security check for a lot of people not all v happy about it.

Anyway observed at close quarters Hilary Clinton is not a tough severe sort of person at all but warm, friendly plus she can be very funny. I am sure the USA will vote for somebody normal. I have no idea how and why the hate campaign against her was wipped up kargely on the basis of a private e-mail server.

There is just so much about Trump paralled by the rise and rise of Adolf Hitler - including vendettas and people not taking him seriously.

Big chunks of the USA have not recovered from globalisation and / or work for very poor money side by side with the high rollers of the information technology, media, big pharma and finance industries which are the winners as in the UK. Parts of Chicago, Wayne, New Orleans, Rochester are a desolation beyond the wildest fears of Europeans. If Liam Fox has his way it is a play that could be staged in, say, Middlesborough.

As with the brexiters they no longer identify with traditional Democrats who they see as having sold out the working class. If Trump could stop playing his one man band, shut up and allow people such as Ryan to do the talking he would be in with a real chance. As our rguby people would say play the ball not the man.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCK8hSXhJw8

"Now Main Street's whitewashed windows and vacant stores
Seems like there ain't nobody wants to come down here no more
They're closing down the textile mill across the railroad tracks
Foreman says these jobs are going boys and they ain't coming back to your hometown"

The Boss

In my opinion, women who won't vote for Hil because she's a woman need to come up with a better excuse than that. They remind me of women who needle on to outshine their daughters. Don't you just love that kind of ego?

Do you think Hil and her pals may have to begin to sling mud about the Russian connection, about the bankruptcies, about the fact that T was not self-made (didn't his father stump up for him?)? Where's Bill? Is she keeping him out of the way?

God help the US if T makes it. :-0

god help the world if Trump makes it!

Have the Canadians started building a wall yet?

;-)

we're waiting for Trump to build it ;-)

:-D :-D :-D

Rollo, that rust-belt scenario you mention that could be played out in Middlesbrough could be played out across north-east England as a whole.

It would spell disaster for thousands of families as we well know.

The finger points .... not only for thee .... :-S

Nutty or otherwise, it is reckoned Mr Trump would not have been chosen as the Republican candidate had the choice been left entirely to Sennators & Congressmen.

'Violent Soundbites' - the words we hear broadcast constantly - are not real debates.

Trump would NOT have been chosen by Senators, Congressmen, leaders of the Republican Party OR main stream republicans.

BUT his way of talking, repulsive though it might be to us, appeals to members of the right wing Republicans (aka Tea Party), to the red necks and to those I mentioned before ..... the lower and lower middle class people who have lost jobs, homes and even families as industry has left the US for overseas.

Those groups all blame the Democrats AND mainstream Republicans.

In addition, the other platform of the Tea Party members is evangelical christianity .... and Trump has been proclaiming himself an evangelical christian since soon after he started his campaign.

That all means changes to laws that have been in place for years re abortion, freedom of choice, rights for LGBTQ, etc etc etc

freedom of choice - isn't that in the 'wholly grail' of amendments somewhere? If it is, why would he change it.
:-0

Eight years ago the US had to choose between a coloured male or a white woman.
They chose the former.

This time the US must choose between that same white woman or
a self made billionaire megalomaniac.

he ain't self made David

Ann's correct ..... his father was self-made, Trump benefitted from money his father made by being a dreadful landlord in cewrtain areas of NY. The kind of landlord who raises rents ....... Fred Trump even inspired a song written but never recorded by Woody Guthrie in 1950

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/jun/30/old-man-trump-tom-morello-ani-difranco-woody-guthrie

"More than 60 years ago, Woody Guthrie bemoaned his landlord – Donald Trump’s father, Fred Trump – in unrecorded song lyrics. Now a group of artists has turned his writing into a modern protest song as Trump’s son Donald continues his candidacy for US president.
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The elder Trump was Guthrie’s landlord for two years in the 1950s. The public housing complex, named Beach Haven, was built near Coney Island and almost exclusively housed white tenants. (Kaufman described the neighborhood as “lily-white”.) Trump, who built Beach Haven using federal loans, made significant profits from the project.

In 1954, after Guthrie had already moved out, Trump was the subject of a federal investigation for overstating the cost of developing Beach Haven and pocketing the $3.7m difference. A Village Voice investigative series published in 1979 looked at the Trumps’ real estate empire, including the cases brought by the US justice department alleging “racially discriminatory conduct by Trump agents”.

Guthrie’s writings focus in particular on the racial segregation within the housing complex: “I suppose/Old Man Trump knows/Just how much/Racial Hate/he stirred up/In the bloodpot of human hearts/When he drawed/That color line/Here at his/1800 family project”.
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Guthrie penned Old Man Trump at a time when he was thinking deeply about race and segregation in the US, Kaufman said. In a letter to his friend activist Stetson Kennedy, Guthrie described the Beach Haven complex as a “JimCrow [sic] town”.

“His landlord Fred Trump is in essence the mayor of ‘JimCrow town’, this segregated town,” Kaufman explained. Guthrie lived in Beach Haven for two years until his wife broke the lease with Trump when Guthrie became increasingly ill after being diagnosed with Huntington’s disease. Kaufman said he returned to Guthrie’s writings on Fred Trump as Donald Trump began to discuss race on the campaign trail. Trump has proposed banning all Muslims from the US and said an Indiana-born federal judge was biased because of his Mexican heritage."



THAT was Donald Trump's upbringing ..... on money made from public housing, and gouging


see also

http://theconversation.com/woody-guthrie-old-man-trump-and-a-real-estate-empires-racist-foundations-53026

"In 1979, 12 years after Guthrie had succumbed to the death sentence of Huntington’s Disease, Village Voice reporter Wayne Barrett published a two-part exposé about Fred and Donald Trump’s real estate empire.

Barrett devoted substantial attention to the cases brought against the Trumps in 1973 and 1978 by the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department. A major charge was that “racially discriminatory conduct by Trump agents” had “created a substantial impediment to the full enjoyment of equal opportunity.” The most damning evidence had come from Trump’s own employees. As Barrett summarizes:

According to court records, four superintendents or rental agents confirmed that applications sent to the central [Trump] office for acceptance or rejection were coded by race. Three doormen were told to discourage blacks who came seeking apartments when the manager was out, either by claiming no vacancies or hiking up the rents. A super said he was instructed to send black applicants to the central office but to accept white applications on site. Another rental agent said that Fred Trump had instructed him not to rent to blacks. Further, the agent said Trump wanted “to decrease the number of black tenants” already in the development “by encouraging them to locate housing elsewhere.” "