US President-elect Donald Trump with Alibaba founder Jack Ma. (Reuters file photo)

Blaming others is the best medicine for hiding own failures and lack of wisdom. This is more common in politics all over the world including the US. Over the years, Americans have been sold this rhetoric by their political elites that reasons of all their woes are matters like free trade, outsourcing and jobs being stolen by countries like China and India.

President-elect Donald Trump has promised Americans that he would bring back jobs to make the country “great” again. However, what the Americans fail to understand or what they have not been made to understand is the fact that over the years, US elites have been following a strategy that doesn’t focus on the interests of the citizens as much as it does on foreign assets and wars. Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba group founder Jack Ma flagged these concerns during the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting Forum 2017.

“It’s not that other countries steal American jobs; it is your strategy – that you did not distribute the money in a proper way,” Ma was quoted as saying by weforum.org.

American companies have been the biggest beneficiaries of globalisation and earned unparalleled profits as compared to companies in other countries. Ma cited names of companies like Microsoft, Cisco and IBM. But, he rued that the wealth earned by American companies was wasted. “In the past 30 years, America has had 13 wars at a cost of $14.2 trillion. That’s where the money went,” he said.

Talking about the 2008 financial crisis, Ma wondered as to why the US decided to bankroll Wall Street. He argued the money could have been spent on other areas. “What if they had spent part of that money on building up their infrastructure, helping white-collar and blue-collar workers? You’re supposed to spend money on your own people.”

Amidst rumours that China and the US may get involved into a trade war under Trump regime, Ma told a panel at WEF, “China and (the) US will never have a trade war. Give Trump some time. He’s open minded.”

Ma had met Trump last week and shared Alibaba’s plan to bring one million small US businesses onto its platform to sell to Chinese consumers over the next five years.

(With agency inputs)