Author Archives: markdowe1

Donald Trump, Government, Politics, Society, United States

The 58th presidency of the United States looms

UNITED STATES

donald-trump

President-elect Donald Trump will be inaugurated on January 20, 2017, at the United States Capitol.

Intro: Donald Trump now needs to be presidential. From January 20, what he says and how he acts will soon no longer be a preamble or rehearsal in garnering support.

DONALD TRUMP made some extraordinary pronouncements during the U.S. election campaign. Alongside his current Twitter feed, one which gives insight into his thinking and intentions, Americans will be awaiting his anointment as president with a mounting sense of either delight or dread.

The Trump show will shortly begin. As the most powerful man in the world he will be under the spotlight as never before, holding centre stage, with everyone watching. From January 20, what he says and how he acts will soon no longer be a preamble or rehearsal in garnering support.

Following the announcement in November of his election victory, the president-elect gave a surprising reaction after meeting the man he will replace at the White House.

He spoke of his “great respect” for Mr Obama and said he very much looked forward to taking his counsel in the future.

Fine words, and we should hope they are true. Mr Trump would do well, too, to pay equal deference to the US’s top intelligence officials who have briefed him over Russia’s interference in the presidential election.

Many observers, not just in America, but elsewhere, will have reacted with dismay and disbelief to Mr Trump’s previous attempts to rubbish the case as a political witch hunt by people smarting from being “beaten very badly” in the election. If this is a sign to come, Mr Trump needs to battle against his own instincts.

Being president is entirely different from being a presidential candidate, when the objective – as we have clearly seen – is to discredit your opponents and come out on top.

The Oval Office is all about nurturing allies and building alliances. Whilst the Republicans will hold more of the cards than the Democrats did under the current administration, a position in which Mr Trump is likely to get all his policies enacted, he will soon find out that no one person can do it all.

The new White House communications director Sean Spicer has pledged that the incoming president will listen to intelligence briefings with a “100 per cent” open mind. We trust that will be the case. Mr Spicer implicitly stated that Donald Trump would be prepared to listen and understand how the intelligence services reached their conclusions. He also stressed that a rush to judgment was not in the US’s best interest.

Many will hope that the president-to-be will also take that counsel. Standing up against the establishment and the political machine during the election campaign is one thing, which might win a few votes from the disaffected; but, as president – or more importantly commander in chief – Mr Trump is going to have to work with these people.

Trust will need to go both ways. Otherwise the world will undoubtedly become a more dangerous place.

There have already been many questions over Mr Trump’s relationship with Russia, no more so than the business interests he and other members of his government have there. There is expectation that Mr Trump will do things no previous president has done.

But, he must also understand there are things he has to do and ways he has to act. Mr Trump will have many advisers, though many will wonder whether he can take their advice on important matters of the state.

As global insecurity increases, Mr Trump cannot be allowed to be a loose cannon.

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Arts, Government, Politics, Russia, Society, Technology, United States

The terrifying era of internet warfare

CYBER WARS

russian-hackers

America’s CIA says Vladimir Putin was behind Russian hackers’ bid to swing the U.S. presidential election. As the fallout continues, cyber wars are only at the infancy stage of the internet-war era.

SINCE the presidential election result was announced in November, America has become an embittered battlefield. The role of Russia in securing Donald Trump’s victory has caused fierce controversy.

The CIA, America’s intelligence agency, has asserted with “high confidence” that Kremlin-directed hackers were responsible for the revelation through Wikileaks of thousands of Democratic Party emails, derailing the Hillary Clinton campaign wagon just at a crucial moment during the election when Trump was in trouble over his misogynistic attitudes and appalling treatment of women.

In sensational developments last month, intelligence officials said that Russia’s President Putin was personally involved in the hacking campaign.

If that was not enough to spark intense unease in Western capitals, a spokesperson for President Obama launched an extraordinary attack on Mr Trump, saying that it was “obvious” he knew about the Russian interference in the election.

The President-elect dismisses as “ridiculous” the charges that the Russians helped to place him, their avowed friend, in the White House. Few even among his foes suggest that he won solely thanks to the hackers. But the 2016 U.S. election has highlighted the extraordinary influence now wielded by the internet upon every aspect of our world.

The former U.S. Secretary of State, Dr Henry Kissinger, wrote presciently in his 2014 book World Order: ‘Presidential elections are on the verge of turning into media contests between master operators of the internet . . . whose intrusiveness would have been considered only a generation ago the stuff of science fiction.’

What is most chilling, however, is the speed with which cyber conflict is now evolving.

America’s Information Operational Technology Centre was created in 1998 to spy on actual and potential enemies, corrupt their digital networks, and even by controlling their computers. Its early operations were unimpressive. During the 1999 bombing of Kosovo, its geeks made Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic’s telephone ring incessantly, which seems merely to have annoyed him.

Before one anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the Americans took down an Al Qaeda website, blocking the planned release of a propaganda broadcast by Osama bin Laden. Afterwards, however, counter-terrorist officers bitterly protested that all that had been achieved was to alert Al Qaeda to the vulnerability of its communications.

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Britain, Government, Health, Politics

Why are we letting the whole world use our health service?

NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE

health-tourism

The National Health Service is under considerable strain. It is not an international health service providing a worldwide service.

LAST year foreign patients left the NHS with an unpaid bill of almost £30million.

That is nearly double the amount for the previous year and clear evidence that action must be taken to clamp down on health tourism.

The NHS, as the Department of Health has rightly said, is a national health service not an international one.

There is simply no way that the British taxpayer can afford to pay for the rest of the world to come here and access treatment.

It would of course be inhumane to turn away anybody in need of emergency care while they are in this country.

But that is not to say that the NHS is obliged to treat for free any individual who happens to suffer from a minor illness or requires non-urgent treatment while on British soil.

For all the tough talk we are continuing to offer healthcare worth huge sums of money to people who have no right to it.

An explosion in demand is putting the NHS under increasing pressure.

This is not purely the result of health tourism but stopping people from overseas from accessing free treatment should be easy.

That ministers allow them to keep getting away with it is worrying. We are not a country that should be providing free-for-all.

We need the Government to put British taxpayers first and stop others from abusing our health service.

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