Did I get that right?
I’m a reader of the South China Morning Post (it once did a feature on me when I was pioneering digital media real estate back in the early 1990’s).
I read SCMP because I seek objectivity when assessing “The American ‘Condition‘” under Donald Trump.
Today’s SCMP carried an article that everyone should read.
I admit that throughout the election period I was sometimes a little rough on “The Donald“, but really! I’ve known of him through all the nightmare stories about him in our industry.
How he would run up excessive bills with mom and pop contractors and then threaten bankruptcy (condos are always developed in “shell companies” that are handed off the the owners in the end to manage) was common knowledge.
I’ve said here at simply charles many times that, as a professional salesman, I am offended every time the media refers to him as one.
He is not. He does use many of the same tactics and techniques, but true professional salespeople, must believe in what they are selling or they simply don’t sell it.
You see, we can’t because the only thing that differentiates a professional salesperson from a con artist is, in fact integrity.
I know lots of con artists as I grew up with and made my fortunes amongst and many times in spite of them. To be an entrepreneur is to constantly swim with the big fish and if you’ve noticed what big fish do to little fish, well let’s just say you had better be able to spot one when one appears.
For example, from 2000 through about 2015, I was one on the all time top producing Realtors in Toronto’s Condoland, having introduced both “Buyer Agency” and “digital real estate“, having produced my first digital application on Condoland in 1991 before there was an Internet, World Wide Web, Windows Operating Systems, PC’s and all that stuff!
Not that I’m a “techie” as anyone who knows me would tell you that I’m anything but. A technophobe would be much more accurate. But I had the vision, in 1989 as the Toronto condo market “crashed” around me, that computers would one day link buyers and sellers around the globe.
Fortunately I met a partner who, with no computer training whatsoever, literally “tamed the beast” right out of the blocks and took my “vision” and shaped it into the digital marvel that brought us fame both in Canada and Hong Kong.
That original DOS CD-ROM, actually proved a failure as getting it out to users proved an almost insurmountable challenge for a small self-financing entrepreneurs like us. I almost lost my shirt trying, but as an entrepreneur that’s what you do!
What the exercise did do was equip us for what was to take place a decade later when the Internet finally came around.
The template for that Hong Kong CD-ROM easily was “repurposed” to become Toronto Condoland’s first and (for quite a while) only web site. Within a few years many/most other Realtors caught on and copied our site, but by then simply condos.com was a household name.
And most Realtors were trying to be everything to everybody and we advertised ourselves as “Exclusive Buyer’s Agents” (another first) and well, the rest is history and today we are happily retired in Bronte Village, a magnificent lakefront and beach community just 40 minutes drive west of Toronto.
I tell you all this not to brag, but to give you some confidence in my having some credibility at least of perspective having travelled the world, walked on the Great Wall of China, and never having had a job!
So when I see a guy like Donald Trump being called a successful salesman I kind of relate to his theory on the Press as fake news.
I am actually disgusted to see how lacking in integrity our entire North American culture is.
We (well Americans) boast superiority yet we admire those who can lie.
This Trump and Russia reality TV Series that I quite frankly got bored of with the election is frankly intellectually insulting!
To think that anyone could “steal America“, by undermining its government and subverting its President is simply stuff that cheap novels are made of but not something that any rational mind would tolerate.
To see it actually happen and worse, discover that there is no corrective mechanism in place, throws serious question onto this alleged “once-great nation” if there ever was such a thing.
I wrote during the Presidential campaign that “the only person capable of bringing down ‘The Donald’ is ‘The Donald“, and the man has made me look like a fortune teller (and we haven’t seen the punch-line yet)!
I also said in earlier blogs that although he talks like a tough guy (after all he did appear in WWE a couple times) you can see (if you come from the streets where I come from at least) that that also is all smoke and mirrors!
But now he’s got his hands on the nuclear codes!
And he’s trying to bluff his way to intimidating Kim Jung Un or North Korea, by bluffing that the knows how to bluff.
How many braggadocious claims of Trump have come back and slapped his face!
So now, the Republicans are going to absolutely compromise their personal and party integrity “to give him a win“!
Think about it! The majority of Americans feel that it is bad for them and the majority think that there was collusion from Russia, which are about as serious of crimes and crimes come . . . . . at there is no mechanism to “fire a President with cause“! Shame! Shame! Shame!
Even on the street you learn to always leave your adversary an escape route!
And they really have the gaul to spout off about being “the greatest democracy in the world“.
As a nation, they are broke, high on the vapour of cheap money (because they can literally just print more of it) and digging themselves deeper and deeper into a quagmire that is to be the good old U.S.ofA.
I’m not saying that Canada is any better but we are just not as “in your face” as they are down there.
I don’t even mind ‘in your face’, and many people would probably say that ‘in your face’ is one of my more endearing attributes (and some maybe not).
But people ‘in your face’ with lies are simply not something that I’m prepared to tolerate.
So, the mental patients have taken over the sanitarium and there’s no-one left to stop them as they continue to do the sanitarium’s business of treating “sick people” but oversight has been waived if not discarded.
This young and inexperienced leader of North Korea is not someone to be taken lightly. He has had killed anyone and everyone that he is uncomfortable with.
He also hold the trigger to their nation’s nuclear arsenal.
We may have a mutual mentally deficient example of modern day David and Goliath, but with world devastation as a possible outcome, let’s not get carried away sweating just the millions of immediate deaths of South Koreans not to mention America’s own 60,000 troops stationed there.
Can someone help me out with the math here?
Trump wants to give Americans a major tax break (depletes revenues) while beating the drums of war (depletes revenues to even put up the front let alone actually going to war) and destabilizing the entire area and potentially killing millions!
And did I say that there is no mechanism in place to stop this guy?
Look at what Mark Rubio said prior to Trump’s election and play a sound bite of what he says today. The list of similar Republican intellectual masqueraders is too lengthy to get sidetracked with here.
My point is clear.
How can an already bankrupt (financially and morally) nation pass a tax bill that adds another $1.5 Trillion in Debt onto an already unsustainable debt crisis?
I do believe that we might be seeing the actual downfall of America.
China is on the rise and they plan for a century down the road and Trump is minute to minute!
I watched him shake the Japanese Prime Minister’s hand looking like he was about to shake the arm right off the man’s shoulders, which is decidedly unacceptable in the Asian culture!
I believe that once a nation has lost its moral compass, it legitimately has lost its way.
Gravity tells us that nothing can go up for ever, yet Americans apparently believe their deficits can, and I fear that we Canadians, as usual, are unhealthily following our neighbours to the south to the wrong drum beat here.
I do not believe in debt. Either personal debt, business debt, government debt.
When integrity leaves, there really is nothing left.
I’m Charles
