[Update-1] Steve Bannon Is OUT!

I doubt this will matter at all! White House and U.S Presidency on a sliding path down.

As 21st century  communication across the globe has become state of the art, isolationism and nationalism seems to be a real winner. Everyone wants to recognize themselves as belonging to a tribe. I grew up in the years of adventurism, emigrations and the feeling we are all part of a global community. Responsibility for one another, democracy with a social heart, passport? … I prefer a to be considered a globetrotter. Explore the features of different cultures belonging to distinct history and geography. That’s why I found happiness in Europe and have no desire to return to insecurity and violence of the United States of America.

We had the suffering of 8 years under George W. Bush, the Iraq War and spreading the War on Terror across vast continents of Africa, Middle East, Southeast Asia and recently into Western Europe. Politics needs fear, the boogeyman and there is no distinction between Democrats and Republicans to exploit primal instinct of humans.

○ Exploiting Fear: The Psychology of War

United States’ global image suffering under Donald Trump’s presidency: survey | DW |

The image of the United States is in sharp decline across the world under the leadership of Donald Trump, a survey from the Pew Research Center shows.

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The survey, which covered 37 countries, showed US favorability ratings dropping to 49 percent just five months into Trump’s presidency. This compares with 64 percent at the end of his predecessor Barack Obama‘s 8-year term in office.

Trump himself scored even lower in the survey, with just 22 percent of respondents saying they trusted him to do the right thing in international affairs, compared with 64 percent for Obama.

Continued below the fold …

The only two countries that saw ratings improve for Trump over Obama were Russia, where confidence in the US president rose to 53 percent from 11 percent, and Israel, where there was an increase of 7 points to 56 percent.

Russia was also the only nation that the study found to have a large improvement in its image of the US, with 41 percent of Russians having a favorable view compared with 15 percent in 2017.  

Putin more trustworthy than Trump, say Germans, other US allies: survey | DW |

People in a number of US-allied nations trust Vladimir Putin more than Donald Trump when it comes to handling foreign affairs, according to a new survey. The results show a significant lack of confidence in both leaders.

The research, published by the Pew Research Center, aimed to measure global perceptions of Russia and its leader, Vladimir Putin.

The study found that only one in four people in the 37 countries surveyed have confidence in the Russian president to do the right thing when it comes to international affairs. Respondents in Europe were the most critical, with around 78 percent expressing a lack of trust in his leadership.

The survey noted, however, that “although confidence in Putin’s handling of foreign affairs is generally low, in many countries he is more trusted than American President Donald Trump.”

Not much confidence in Trump

Respondents in US allies such as Japan, South Korea and seven European NATO members – Greece, Germany, Turkey, Hungary, France, Italy and Spain – which have historically relied on the US for military support and defense, all expressed more confidence in Putin.

One reason for this may be the erratic comments Trump has made on world issues since he entered office in January – questioning the validity and effectiveness of NATO, delaying affirmation of the alliance’s mutual defense pact, and accusing members of not pulling their weight.

The disparity in favor of Putin over Trump was most stark in Greece and Germany, where he outscored the US president by 31 and 14 points, respectively. In Germany, around a quarter of respondents said they had confidence in Putin, while only 11 percent said the same of Trump.

But not all NATO members’ citizens found Putin a more trustworthy leader. Trump got higher scores in Britain, Canada, the Netherlands and Poland, according to the survey. He was also the more favorable option for non-NATO allies Australia and the Philippines, as well as Israel, where he outscored Putin by a whopping 29 points.

America a greater security risk than Russia

Despite holding a generally dim view of Putin’s approach to foreign policy, few respondents thought of Russia as a security risk. Globally, 31 percent of people described Russia’s power and influence as a major threat to their country – last place on a list that included the “Islamic State” extremist group, climate change and international cyberattacks. The same number thought of China as a threat, while 35 percent saw America’s influence as dangerous.

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○ Steve Bannon: appointment of ‘white nationalist’ must be reversed, critics declare| The Guardian – Nov. 15, 2016 |
○ Steve Bannon Compared Occupy Protesters to Nazi Brownshirts

As an aside, I came across this book … interesting!

Globalisation means for most people on this planet higher fences and less movement across borders. The new book by anthropologist Shahram Khosravi is an auto-ethnography of illegalised border crossing.

‘Illegal’ Traveller is based on the anthropologists’s own journey from Iran to Sweden and his informants’ border narratives. “Studies of migrant illegality are often written by people who have never experienced it”, he writes in the introduction. “My aim has been to offer an alternative, partly first-hand, account of unauthorized border crossing that attempts to read the world through `illegal’ eyes.

The ‘illegal’ traveller: an auto-ethnography of borders

In this paper he describes his journey from Iran to Europe as “illegal” refugee and theoreticizes about the `world apartheid’ we live in according to him and criticizes the ways we think about borders and migration:

    Based on a capitalist-oriented and racial discriminating way of thinking, borders regulate movements of people. However, borders are also the space of defiance and resistance.

It is because of this resistance he is still alive. In September 1986 he tried to leave Iran `illegally’ for the first time. “I had then just finished high school and I was called up to do military service during the ongoing terrible war between Iran and Iraq. To come back alive from the front was a chance I did not want to take”, he writes.

It was a long journey via Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. He ended up in Sweden via human smugglers. They saved him his life.

Human smuggling is in his opinion recurrently misrepresented by the media and politicians as an entirely mafia-controlled criminality. One of his helpers was Homayoun, a 25-year-old Afghani man, an undocumented immigrant, who had lived clandestinely in Iran since he was 15:

    According to immigration law, Homayoun was a human smuggler, a law breaker and a criminal. But in fact he saved my life in one of the most dangerous places, under the rule of ruthless criminal gangs, corrupt border guards and fanatic Mujaheddin. (…) Homayoun facilitated my escape from undesired martyrdom in a long and bloody war.

Maybe one can say that the smugglers did what the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) was supposed to do?  

As AG’s plight to convey a socio-political message would express himself …

WTF UP!

The world is larger than the 50 states representing 5% of earth’s population. All men are created equal … it’s not wealth to determine “democratic” and “moral” principles.

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