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PayPal, Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel gives blistering speech on Trump to National Press Club: a realistic outsider who will make America a normal country again
AMAZING SPEECHFull speech here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob-LJqPQEJ4 Full transcript here Highlights: "In real dollars the median household makes less money today than it made 17 years ago. Nearly half of Americans wouldn’t be able to come up with $400 if they needed it for an emergency. Yet while households struggle to keep up with the challenges of everyday life, the government is wasting trillions of dollars of taxpayer money on faraway wars. Right now we’re fighting five of them in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen and Somalia." ... "The sheer size of the US trade deficit shows that something has gone badly wrong. The most developed country in the world should be exporting capital to less developed countries. Instead the US is importing more than $500 billion every year. That money flows into financial assets, it distorts our economy in favour of more banking and more financialisation and it gives the well-connected people who benefit a reason to defend the status quo. But not everyone benefits, and the Trump voters know it. I think Trump voters are also tired of war. We’ve been at war for 15 years and we’ve spent more than $4.6 trillion. More than 2 million people have lost their lives and more than 5000 US soldiers have been killed. But we haven’t won. The Bush administration promised that $50 billion could bring democracy to Iraq. Instead, we’ve squandered 40 times as much to bring about chaos. Yet even after these bipartisan failures, the Democratic party is more hawkish today than at any time since it began the war in Vietnam. Harking back to the no-fly zone that Bill Clinton enforced over Iraq before Bush’s failed war, now Hillary Clinton has called for a no-fly zone over Syria. Incredibly, that would be a mistake even more reckless than invading Iraq since most planes flying over Syria today are Russian planes. Clinton’s proposed course of action would do worse than involve us in a messy civil war, it would risk a direct nuclear conflict. What explains this eagerness to escalate the dangerous situation? How can Hillary Clinton be so wildly over-optimistic about the outcome of war? I would suggest that it comes from a lot of practice. For a long time our elites have been in the habit of denying difficult realities." ... "Just as much as it’s about making America great, Trump’s agenda is about making America a normal country. A normal country doesn’t have a half-trillion dollar trade deficit. A normal country doesn’t fight five simultaneous undeclared wars. In a normal country the government actually does its job. And today it’s important to recognise that the government has a job to do." Posted by: anon1 2016-10-31 |
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