Trump mocks Indian call centres

Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump used a fake accent to mock a call centre representative in India.

At the same time, he described India as a great place. The billionaire from New York said he called up his credit card company to find out whether their customer support is based in the U.S. or overseas.

“Guess what, you’re talking to a person from India. How the hell does that work?” he told his supporters in Delaware. “So I called up, under the guise I’m checking on my card, I said, ‘Where are you from?’” Mr. Trump said and then he copied the response from the call centre in a fake Indian accent. “We are from India,” Mr. Trump impersonated the response.

Fake accent

“Oh great, that’s wonderful,” he said as he pretended to hang up the phone.

“India is great place. I am not upset with other leaders. I am upset with our leaders for being so stupid,” he said. “I am not angry with China. I am not angry at Japan. I am not angry with Vietnam, India...all these countries.”

Mr. Trump mentioned the fake call to India during his remarks on what he described as “crooked banking”.

Delaware is a hub for America’s banking and credit card industry. The list includes Bank of America, Citibank Delaware, M&T Bank and PNC Financial Services Group.

“They are making a lot of money,” he said. “You can’t allow policies that allow China, Mexico, Japan, Vietnam, India. You can’t allow policies that allow business to be ripped out of the United States like candy from a baby.”

“The manufacturing jobs are being stolen. Our jobs are being taken. We are losing at every front. There is nothing good. Our country does not win anymore. The jobs are being stripped. Factories are closing. We are not going to let this happen anymore,” he said.

Mr. Trump added he has as many as 378 companies registered in Delaware, where the Republican presidential primary is scheduled on April 26 along with several other states. He is leading in polls against his other primary rivals.

In his speech, Mr. Trump praised Delaware’s status as a tax shelter and slammed President Barack Obama for not using the term “radical Islamists” in the fight against terrorism. “I want to run against crooked Hillary,” he said.

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How candidates use music for political branding

Even before voters get inside a Hillary Clinton campaign event, they’re confronted with Katy Perry.

Ms. team blasts the candidate’s official playlist of mostly female-led pop ballad bangers — such as Perry’s Roar and Stronger by Kelly Clarkson — so loudly it can easily be heard by those waiting outside venues.

“It’s hard to talk or even hear yourself think,” said Lauren Gambino, a Guardian reporter who has attended over 40 Clinton events this election.

Pop for politics is nothing new — Bill Clinton used Fleetwood Mac’s Don’t Stop, and Barack Obama used will.i.am’s Yes We Can, for instance — and candidates consider music a key element for establishing their personality and inspiring followers.

“Music, as I see it, is the candidate’s attempt to constitute their identity in sound,” explained Dana Gorzelany-Mostak, an assistant professor in music at Georgia College. “To sonically construct themselves in a way that appeals to the voters but also offers insight to who they are and what they stand for,” she said.

Ms. Gorzelany-Mostak is creator and co-editor of ‘Trax on the Trail’, a research project examining the music in the 2016 election, from Bernie Sanders’ folksy 1960s tunes of revolution to Marco Rubio’s love of electronic dance music, aka EDM.

Republican frontrunner Donald Trump’s campaign songs burst out of speakers with virtually no links between them: there’s the Rolling Stones’ Brown Sugar to the Phantom of the Opera to the Hulk Hogan theme song, Real American.

Mr. Trump himself struts onto the stage to Nessun Dorma, a booming and aggressive Puccini aria, sung in Italian by Luciano Pavarotti.

“It’s unrepentantly fascist,” said Dan Roberts, the Guardian’s Washington bureau chief, likening it to attending at Benito Mussolini rally. Mr. Trump’s eclectic mix, supposedly all chosen by him according to his love for the songs, is not typical presidential campaign picks. But they do reflect the unpredictably of the candidate.

“Trump’s entire reputation is sort of built upon this idea of a candidate taking up unpopular positions,” said Ms. Gorzelany-Mostak.

Marco Rubio’s beats reflect a young Latino man who grew up in Miami more than they do a conservative Republican, with Flo Rida, the Black Eyed Peas and Calvin Harris all on regular rotation.

Lately, Mr. Rubio bounces out onto stage to AC/DC’s Thunderstruck and leaves to Greater, by Christian pop group Mercy Me. Mr. Rubio has spoken to CNN about his love for EDM, denying he had ever been to a rave but saying he grew up listening to 90s west coast hip hop, and now enjoys dance music.

But he was careful to note that his favourites were country songs laid over electronic music — meaning the lyrics were clean.

The country music is also “a nod to the people he is campaigning in front of,” said Sabrina Siddiqui, a journalist who has trailed the senator’s campaign.

Ted Cruz, the hard-line evangelical candidate from Texas, plays country and Christian pop, including Stars and Stripes and the Eagle Fly by Aaron Tippin and tunes from the Christian band Newsboys.

But his music doesn’t garner much attention, since his few tracks often repeat, and they clearly meld with his image as a conservative and deeply religious southerner.

Bernie Sander’s music, like his politics, revolves around revolution: Power to the People by John Lennon, Talkin’ Bout a Revolution by Tracy Chapman, The Revolution Starts Now by Steve Earle.

But ever since David Bowie’s death in January, Mr. Sanders has left the stage to the strains of Bowie’s Starman: “There’s a starman waiting in the sky / He’d like to come and meet us / But he thinks he’d blow our minds”.

It’s a strategic pick. “Bowie: he’s a rebel, a revolutionary, a radical, all wrapped in one charismatic man,” Ms. Gorzelany—Mostak said, asking “Can Sanders channel some of that star magic?”

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Republicans’ frantic efforts to derail Donald Trump fall flat

The scenario Karl Rove outlined was bleak.

Addressing a luncheon of Republican governors and donors in Washington on February 19, he warned that Donald Trump’s increasingly likely nomination would be catastrophic, dooming the party in November. But Rove, the master strategist of George W. Bush’s campaigns, insisted it was not too late for them to stop Mr. Trump, according to three people present.

At a meeting of Republican Governors the next morning, Paul R. LePage of Maine called for action. Seated at a long boardroom table at the Willard Hotel, he erupted in frustration over the state of the 2016 race, saying Mr. Trump’s nomination would deeply wound the Republican Party.

Mr. LePage urged the Governors to draft an open letter “to the people,” disavowing Mr. Trump and his divisive brand of politics.

The suggestion was not taken up. Since then, Mr. Trump has only gotten stronger, winning two more State contests and collecting the endorsement of Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey. In public, there were calls for the party to unite behind a single candidate. In dozens of interviews, elected officials, political strategists and donors described a frantic, last-ditch campaign to block Mr. Trump — and the agonising reasons that many of them have become convinced it will fail. Behind the scenes, a desperate mission to save the party sputtered and stalled at every turn.

On Friday, a few hours after Mr. Christie endorsed him, Mr. Trump collected support from a second Governor, who said Mr. Trump could be “one of the greatest presidents.” That Governor was Paul LePage.

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The gale called Bernie Sanders

When a breath of fresh air shows signs of acquiring gale-force proportions, a nation sits up and pays attention. Thus it is with the U.S.’s only Democratic Socialist contender in this year’s race to the Oval Office, Bernard ‘Bernie’ Sanders.

Mr. Sanders, who has risen sharply in the pre-primary polling to pull up alongside arch-rival Hillary Clinton in Iowa and outstrip her in New Hampshire, has always been something of an enigma, both for his politics and his origins.

The U.S. Senator hails from Vermont, home to numerous frosty delights including the world-famous Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, heavenly ski slopes, and also the least religious population of any American state.

Though his antecedents may be cool, his energetic campaign to take on the runaway machines of rugged American capitalism and fight for the welfare of the middle class has fired up his supporters across the nation and put Ms. Clinton, the Washington insider, on notice.

It is evident from the Democratic debates held so far that Mr. Sanders easily combines a folksy appeal — the likes of what George W. Bush had — with his socialist vision for a more equitable American economy, whether in terms of free tuition at public universities, campaign finance reform, or single-payer health insurance.

An undefined “socialism”
However, it would be wise to not get carried away by what “socialism” means in Mr. Sanders’ paradigm, for if it ever became a reality, it would be a far cry from Vladimir Lenin’s Russia, or even Jyoti Basu’s West Bengal.

Yes, unchecked income inequality has consistently been a target of Mr. Sanders; yet he is hardly what one would describe as a radical leftist, certainly not compared to the Western European notion of that concept.

Mr. Sanders has almost deliberately shied away from offering a clear definition of his socialism, and his remarks so far reflect that he is aware of his audience’s general discomfiture with the term.

“When I use the world socialist — and I know some people aren’t comfortable about it — I’m saying that it is imperative [that we] create a government that works for all and not just the few,” Mr. Sanders said in November 2015.

Yet, earlier this month, the depth of his “socialism” was critiqued in an article by The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates, who condemned Mr. Sanders’s dismissal of the idea that reparations should be paid to the descendants of historic racial injustice in the U.S.

Mr. Coates wrote, “What candidates name themselves is generally believed to be important... Is shy incrementalism really the lesson of this fortuitous outburst of Vermont radicalism?”

Indeed, it is quite possible that when Mr. Sanders announced his candidacy for the presidential nomination, he embraced socialism out of sheer pragmatism, as a label that would emphasise that he was cut from a different cloth of liberalism, and that would thus help him evade the inevitable comparison to Ms. Clinton.

However, this has left him vulnerable to penetrating questions from liberals regarding a range of issues on which his progressive credentials remain unproven.

Take gun control reform, an issue that has seared the conscience of the U.S. in recent years in the wake of a series of devastating shooting rampages at schools, houses of worship and other public spaces. Mr. Sanders came under a volley of criticism from Ms. Clinton early on in the debate season for his decidedly illiberal decision to vote in favour of the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which was passed in 2005 and gave broad legal immunity to gunmakers and dealers from demands that they make their products safer or their sales better monitored.

In late January 2016, he backtracked and agreed to co-sponsor a bill that would repeal this very law he voted for, one that the National Rifle Association’s Wayne LaPierre described as “the most significant piece of pro-gun legislation in 20 years.” As a footnote, Ms. Clinton voted against the law.

On another hard-fought liberal issue, women’s reproductive rights, Mr. Sanders stood on firmer ground for always voting pro-choice in the U.S. Congress, but found himself tested last week when Planned Parenthood, a large, national federation of healthcare agencies catering primarily to women, issued a presidential endorsement of Ms. Clinton.

Mr. Sanders responded to the endorsement by calling non-profit organisations such as Planned Parenthood a “part of the establishment” that he was seeking to challenge, a war cry that puts a premium on being an Obama-esque outsider to the stilted politics of Washington’s Beltway.

Succeeding Obama
Is Mr. Sanders the true inheritor of U.S. President Barack Obama’s mantle of “hope and change?”

While the answer would depend on whom you asked, Mr. Obama appeared to teeter on the brink of revealing his preferred candidate when he met Mr. Sanders at the White House on January 27.

He said in an interview just before that meeting, “Bernie came in with the luxury of being a complete long shot and just letting loose. I think Hillary came in with the both privilege — and burden — of being perceived as the front runner… You’re always looking at the bright, shiny object that people haven’t seen before — that’s a disadvantage to her.”

In some ways, going by his campaign promises, Mr. Sanders is the better man to take the agenda of the Obama years forward, especially if that means filling some gaping holes that emerged during Mr. Obama’s reign.

One example would be going after what Mr. Sanders called the “casino capitalism” of Wall Street banks that resulted in the Great Recession of 2008; another, fulfilling that heretofore unrealised Obama promise to shut down Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba; a third maybe his call to let regional powers play a greater role in the fight against the Islamic State.

Contrarily, Ms. Clinton is the leader who would hold the nation firm to the Democratic Party’s broader agenda of supporting the middle class during tough economic times, protecting the American labour force from foreign competition, strengthening the government’s backing of women’s reproductive rights, and much more.

Face-off with Trump
A critical factor influencing Mr. Sanders’ surging popularity on the eve of the primary elections this week is the rise of Republican renegade and surprise front- runner Donald Trump.

Even as Mr. Trump has systematically denigrated Muslims, Mexicans and women, among others, Democrats close to the political middle, who fear a broader American swing to the right, may seek safe haven in the arms of the Vermont socialist.

However, if we step back from philosophical and policy issues, tactical voting logic favours Ms. Clinton as long as she and Mr. Trump continue to be the overall front runners.

Wavering Democrats may have no choice but to back her when they realise that for their party to mount a credible challenge to Mr. Trump’s far-right track, they must coalesce around the candidate closest to the political centre.

Only a candidate with the broadest appeal across the political spectrum could win over undecided and independent voters when they go toe-to-toe against Mr. Trump.

But even the canniest observers of the U.S. elections will concede that no outcomes, howsoever strongly suggested by opinion polls, can be assumed until the final votes have been tallied.

Mr. Sanders may or may not blaze a path to the White House but in winning even as much support as he has so far, he has tilted the political firmament in this election towards a more humane, less bigoted idiom, and that is welcome.

Read More

The gale called Bernie Sanders

When a breath of fresh air shows signs of acquiring gale-force proportions, a nation sits up and pays attention. Thus it is with the U.S.’s only Democratic Socialist contender in this year’s race to the Oval Office, Bernard ‘Bernie’ Sanders.

Mr. Sanders, who has risen sharply in the pre-primary polling to pull up alongside arch-rival Hillary Clinton in Iowa and outstrip her in New Hampshire, has always been something of an enigma, both for his politics and his origins.

The U.S. Senator hails from Vermont, home to numerous frosty delights including the world-famous Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, heavenly ski slopes, and also the least religious population of any American state.

Though his antecedents may be cool, his energetic campaign to take on the runaway machines of rugged American capitalism and fight for the welfare of the middle class has fired up his supporters across the nation and put Ms. Clinton, the Washington insider, on notice.

It is evident from the Democratic debates held so far that Mr. Sanders easily combines a folksy appeal — the likes of what George W. Bush had — with his socialist vision for a more equitable American economy, whether in terms of free tuition at public universities, campaign finance reform, or single-payer health insurance.

An undefined “socialism”
However, it would be wise to not get carried away by what “socialism” means in Mr. Sanders’ paradigm, for if it ever became a reality, it would be a far cry from Vladimir Lenin’s Russia, or even Jyoti Basu’s West Bengal.

Yes, unchecked income inequality has consistently been a target of Mr. Sanders; yet he is hardly what one would describe as a radical leftist, certainly not compared to the Western European notion of that concept.

Mr. Sanders has almost deliberately shied away from offering a clear definition of his socialism, and his remarks so far reflect that he is aware of his audience’s general discomfiture with the term.

“When I use the world socialist — and I know some people aren’t comfortable about it — I’m saying that it is imperative [that we] create a government that works for all and not just the few,” Mr. Sanders said in November 2015.

Yet, earlier this month, the depth of his “socialism” was critiqued in an article by The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates, who condemned Mr. Sanders’s dismissal of the idea that reparations should be paid to the descendants of historic racial injustice in the U.S.

Mr. Coates wrote, “What candidates name themselves is generally believed to be important... Is shy incrementalism really the lesson of this fortuitous outburst of Vermont radicalism?”

Indeed, it is quite possible that when Mr. Sanders announced his candidacy for the presidential nomination, he embraced socialism out of sheer pragmatism, as a label that would emphasis that he was cut from a different cloth of liberalism, and that would thus help him evade the inevitable comparison to Ms. Clinton.

However, this has left him vulnerable to penetrating questions from liberals regarding a range of issues on which his progressive credentials remain unproven.

Take gun control reform, an issue that has seared the conscience of the U.S. in recent years in the wake of a series of devastating shooting rampages at schools, houses of worship and other public spaces. Mr. Sanders came under a volley of criticism from Ms. Clinton early on in the debate season for his decidedly illiberal decision to vote in favor of the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which was passed in 2005 and gave broad legal immunity to gunmakers and dealers from demands that they make their products safer or their sales better monitored.

In late January 2016, he backtracked and agreed to co-sponsor a bill that would repeal this very law he voted for, one that the National Rifle Association’s Wayne LaPierre described as “the most significant piece of pro-gun legislation in 20 years.” As a footnote, Ms. Clinton voted against the law.

On another hard-fought liberal issue, women’s reproductive rights, Mr. Sanders stood on firmer ground for always voting pro-choice in the U.S. Congress, but found himself tested last week when Planned Parenthood, a large, national federation of healthcare agencies catering primarily to women, issued a presidential endorsement of Ms. Clinton.

Mr. Sanders responded to the endorsement by calling non-profit organisations such as Planned Parenthood a “part of the establishment” that he was seeking to challenge, a war cry that puts a premium on being an Obama-esque outsider to the stilted politics of Washington’s Beltway.

Succeeding Obama
Is Mr. Sanders the true inheritor of U.S. President Barack Obama’s mantle of “hope and change?”

While the answer would depend on whom you asked, Mr. Obama appeared to teeter on the brink of revealing his preferred candidate when he met Mr. Sanders at the White House on January 27.

He said in an interview just before that meeting, “Bernie came in with the luxury of being a complete long shot and just letting loose. I think Hillary came in with the both privilege — and burden — of being perceived as the front runner… You’re always looking at the bright, shiny object that people haven’t seen before — that’s a disadvantage to her.”

In some ways, going by his campaign promises, Mr. Sanders is the better man to take the agenda of the Obama years forward, especially if that means filling some gaping holes that emerged during Mr. Obama’s reign.

One example would be going after what Mr. Sanders called the “casino capitalism” of Wall Street banks that resulted in the Great Recession of 2008; another, fulfilling that heretofore unrealized Obama promise to shut down Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba; a third maybe his call to let regional powers play a greater role in the fight against the Islamic State.

Contrarily, Ms. Clinton is the leader who would hold the nation firm to the Democratic Party’s broader agenda of supporting the middle class during tough economic times, protecting the American labour force from foreign competition, strengthening the government’s backing of women’s reproductive rights, and much more.

Face-off with Trump
A critical factor influencing Mr. Sanders’ surging popularity on the eve of the primary elections this week is the rise of Republican renegade and surprise front- runner Donald Trump.

Even as Mr. Trump has systematically denigrated Muslims, Mexicans and women, among others, Democrats close to the political middle, who fear a broader American swing to the right, may seek safe haven in the arms of the Vermont socialist.

However, if we step back from philosophical and policy issues, tactical voting logic favours Ms. Clinton as long as she and Mr. Trump continue to be the overall front runners.

Wavering Democrats may have no choice but to back her when they realise that for their party to mount a credible challenge to Mr. Trump’s far-right track, they must coalesce around the candidate closest to the political centre.

Only a candidate with the broadest appeal across the political spectrum could win over undecided and independent voters when they go toe-to-toe against Mr. Trump.

But even the canniest observers of the U.S. elections will concede that no outcomes, howsoever strongly suggested by opinion polls, can be assumed until the final votes have been tallied.

Mr. Sanders may or may not blaze a path to the White House but in winning even as much support as he has so far, he has tilted the political firmament in this election towards a more humane, less bigoted idiom, and that is welcome.

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‘Wall Street’s greed is destroying U.S. fabric’

Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont in a fiery speech on Tuesday laid out his plan to break up “too big to fail” commercial banks and pointedly attacked Hillary Clinton for taking speaking fees from the financial industry and, in his view, not going far enough in her plan to regulate Wall Street. The criticism of Ms. Clinton was some of Mr. Sanders’ strongest to date, and came after he had frequently refrained from such direct attacks.

“My opponent says that as a senator, she told bankers to ‘cut it out’ and end their destructive behaviour,” Mr. Sanders said of Ms. Clinton. “But, in my view, establishment politicians are the ones who need to ‘cut it out’.

‘Patron of bankers’
“The reality is that Congress doesn’t regulate Wall Street. Wall Street and their lobbyists regulate Congress. We must change that reality, and as President, I will.”

Mr. Sanders said that Ms. Clinton was “wrong” to oppose his plan to reinstitute the Glass-Steagall Act, which would legally separate commercial banking, investment banking and insurances services. And the senator implicitly criticised Ms. Clinton for being a patron of bankers when he pointed to their huge campaign donations and noted that they “provide very generous speaking fees to those who go before them”.

Ms. Clinton has made hundreds of thousands of dollars speaking to banks and large corporations over the years.

Speaking at Town Hall in Midtown Manhattan, Mr. Sanders said that if elected President, he would enact much bigger and bolder plans than Ms. Clinton and transform the country’s financial system by enforcing stricter regulations on banks. He also offered some new consumer-friendly proposals such as capping automated teller machine fees at $2 a transaction and limiting credit card interest rates, which he called “usurious”.

“Greed is not good,” Mr. Sanders said, in a rebuttal to the famed character from the movie Wall Street, Gordon Gekko. “In fact, the greed of Wall Street and corporate America is destroying the very fabric of our nation.”

Mr. Sanders, an independent and self-described democratic socialist, often focuses on the financial industry and income inequality in his stump speeches and has released a long list of progressive plans, including expanding social security and making public universities tuition-free, as part of his campaign platform.

Mr. Sanders reiterated his focus on the working class on Tuesday, saying that poorer Americans needed more affordable banking options and that banks must stop taking advantage of vulnerable people.

To make such changes, he said, he would fight to allow post offices to “engage in basic banking services.” Wall Street, Mr. Sanders said, would be held accountable under his administration. “Not only will big banks not be too big to fail, but big-time bankers will not be too big to jail.”

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What lies behind Trump’s ominous speeches?

This is not the first time Donald Trump, the Republican presidential front-runner, is making a controversial comment.

The celebrity politician entered the Republican primary race by suggesting that the Mexicans coming illegally to the U.S. were rapists. He then said John McCain wasn’t a war hero because he was captured in Vietnam. He mocked a journalist for being disabled and once implied that he received hostile questioning during a Republican presidential debate because the television moderator was menstruating.

But Mr. Trump’s call on Monday for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on” was his most extreme pledge yet. The statement was issued to the media a day after he mocked President Barack Obama’s speech from the Oval office on fighting the Islamic terror, and called for profiling Muslims.

Call for profiling
“I think there can be profiling,” Mr. Trump said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” programme on Sunday. “A lot of people are dead right now. So everybody wants to be politically correct, and that’s part of the problem that we have with our country… You have people that have to be tracked. If they’re Muslims, they’re Muslims.”

While Republican Party leaders generally take tough postures against radical Islamism and are supportive of wars abroad, nobody in the election fray has gone this far to suggest that Muslims be profiled or be banned from entering the country. Other Republican candidates as well as the neoconservative intellectuals within the GOP have reacted sharply to Mr. Trump’s comment.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has termed Mr. Trump’s comment a “ridiculous position”, while ex-Florida Governor Jeb Bush called it “unhinged”. In a radio interview, former Vice-President Dick Cheney said “religious freedom’s been a very important part of our, our history.”

“Well, I think this whole notion that somehow we need to say no more Muslims and just ban a whole religion goes against everything we stand for and believe in,” he said.

Though it might appear to be an awkward position for a mainstream political party, there’s a method in Mr. Trump’s extreme comments. He’s trying to consolidate his position among the right-wing Republican vote base through his anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim positions.

It’s worth recalling that the controversial statements he made did nothing to challenge his poll position.

Ahead of his rivals
Mr. Trump is now more than 20 points ahead of his nearest Republican rival, Ben Carson, according to a poll released by CNN on Friday. Latest polls show that Mr. Trump’s popularity among the Republican voters rose after last month’s Paris terror attack in which 130 people were killed. “Every time things get worse, I do better,” Mr. Trump said. “People want strength.”

His latest remarks come close on the heels of the San Bernadino attack where a couple, apparently inspired by the Islamic State terror group, killed 14 people.

Even after his remarks triggered sharp responses from his own party, Mr. Trump appeared to be defiant. While addressing a crowd of cheering supporters on Monday night in South Carolina, he said: “I wrote something today that was very salient, very important… It was probably not politically correct… But. I. Don’t. Care.”

Eric Fehrnstrom, a Republican strategist who advised Mitt Romney in 2012, brushes off negative political impact of Mr. Trump’s extreme positions on his political chances. “As much as anyone may disagree with his policies [and I do], Trump is not hurting himself with GOP voters with his negativity toward Muslims,” he tweeted on Monday.

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