"Obama criticises 'strongman politics' in coded attack on Trump"

...Obama used the Nelson Mandela annual lecture in front of an ecstatic 15,000-strong crowd in Johannesburg to warn that “the politics of fear, resentment, retrenchment” are on the move “at a pace unimaginable just a few years ago.”...America’s first black president...had harsh words for those in the new global elite who are increasingly detached from a locality or any nation state, claiming they were missing the signals of resentment being stored up by globalisation, insecurity and growing inequality. “The previous structure of powers of injustice and exploitation never went away, they were never fully dislodged,” he said. “For all the shining skyscrapers, entire neighbourhoods, cities, regions and nations have been by-passed. For far too many people the more things have changed, the more things stayed the same”. “An explosion in inequality” remained unaddressed, he said. “A few dozen individuals control the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of humanity. That’s not an exaggeration. It’s a statistic.”...

Part of this global elite – rightwing billionaires - were now “cynically funding populist movements that fed on fears that economic insecurity was slipping away, their social status was eroding, their cultural identity was being threatened by outsiders by someone that did not speak like them”. Although he had criticism of Chinese trading practices, and said order in migration was required, he forecast the greatest threat to job security, one of Trump’s central themes, came not from unfair trade, but from technology including artificial intelligence. Warning the world was at a crossroads, he insisted liberal democracy and co-operation had a better story to tell, but said that this could only work if the rich paid more in tax, stopped avoiding paying tax or and stopped blinding themselves to the consequences of decisions taken in boardrooms. “The struggle for basic justice is never truly finished,” he said.