Hard News: Be careful what you wish for
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I can't decide - is it:
"not my leader of the free world"
or is it:
"not the leader of my free world"
I'm sort of leaning to the 2nd one
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The Paris Agreement should survive, because by the time Trump rescinds the US ratification (which requires 12 months notice), enough other countries should have signed up to stay over the 55% of global emissions threshold required by the PA despite the loss of the US's 15%(ish). But it's early days on that...
But the geopolitics is going to be fascinating on all sorts of levels. If Trump does go full on protectionist on trade, what price China stepping in to act as the centrepiece of future multilateral trade agreements? And what will Putin do, now he has a puppet in the White House?
Just thinking about it makes:
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It didn't really fit into the post, but I woke up at 2.30am, remembered that Trump had won and couldn't sleep for another two hours. It appeared from social media that I wasn't alone.
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Russell Brown, in reply to
If Trump does go full on protectionist on trade, what price China stepping in to act as the centrepiece of future multilateral trade agreements?
Oh, absolutely. And they’d quite like the renminbi to be the default global currency too.
I’m not sure the cheerleaders realise the extent to which this presidency could degrade American influence. No wonder the Chinese see it as the beginning of the decline.
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Some day soon, some learned journal will explain the effect of the weakened Voting Rights Act on the 2016 election, It will be retweeted a bit and discussed in places like this by people better informed than me - and it will make no headlines at all. Which is a shame, because it will tell us a lot more than most talking heads that fill the news.
Turnout was suppressed, deliberately and systematically. That doesn't explain everything, but when the data has been properly examined, I wouldn't be at all surprised if it explains a lot. After 50 years of stop-start progress, democracy is going backwards in the USA.
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Russell Brown, in reply to
Some day soon, some learned journal will explain the effect of the weakened Voting Rights Act on the 2016 election
Quite. I didn't have anything to go on there, but we might find out some nasty things.
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The New York Times has a quick summary here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/09/opinion/the-voters-abandoned-by-the-court.html
We see those long queues around the block on TV, and we wonder. There's a background to that: our election commission is non-partisan and wants more people to vote. The USA is different.
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Hebe, in reply to
Mine also. Thanks for the optimism.
Russell: thanks for your coherent thoughts. I slept well because I have consciously distanced myself from this race. Nothing to be done about it but garden: the fig tree is figging.
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Ian Dalziel, in reply to
China
Perhaps China will want the money the US owes it back?
US Economy. The U.S. debt to China is $1.185 trillion, as of August 2016. That's 30% of the $3.948 trillion in Treasury bills, notes, and bonds held by foreign countries. The rest of the $19 trillion debt is owned by either the American people or by the U.S. government itself.Oct 22, 2016
https://www.thebalance.com/u-s-debt-to-china-how-much-does-it-own-3306355
and
The Current Outstanding Public Debt of the United States is:
$19,796,589,500,776.08
Last Updated: Wednesday, November 9th, 2016
Every man, woman and child in the United States currently owes $65,158 for their share of the U.S. public debt -
Rob Stowell, in reply to
“not the leader of my free world”
I’d go with that one. Self-made ignoramus and not the leader of my free world.
These are good times for verbal invective. The Scots got off to a great start but now the shitgibbon is president, the rest of the world is catching on. -
If Trump takes the Isolationist road - he can just plead a typo in his slogan!
'Make America Greta Again'Garbo that is - "I just want to be alone..."
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For the life of me, I don't know why Obama didn't proceed with the Supreme Court appointment. He had time. What a disaster.
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Gareth, in reply to
The U.S. debt to China is $1.185 trillion, as of August 2016
That's we call a hell of a bargaining chip.
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Joe Wylie, in reply to
And they’d quite like the renminbi to be the default global currency too.
They're all tooled up and ready.
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Rob Stowell, in reply to
That's we call a hell of a bargaining chip.
You can't bargain with a chimp. Stiffing creditors is what Trump does best. Also, one consequence of the election is likely to be a fall in the value of the US$ vs the renminbi. China is likely to lose money but gain power ...
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Pew has a take on the poll problem:
One likely culprit is what pollsters refer to as nonresponse bias. This occurs when certain kinds of people systematically do not respond to surveys despite equal opportunity outreach to all parts of the electorate. We know that some groups – including the less educated voters who were a key demographic for Trump on Election Day – are consistently hard for pollsters to reach. It is possible that the frustration and anti-institutional feelings that drove the Trump campaign may also have aligned with an unwillingness to respond to polls. The result would be a strongly pro-Trump segment of the population that simply did not show up in the polls in proportion to their actual share of the population.
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I've been reading a few accounts of Trump voters explaning why they voted for him. One of the strongest through-themes is the economy/jobs/american dream/etc.
I can't help thinking these people are in for a really, really, nasty shock. How that plays out is anybody's guess.
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I've added this graph to the main main post because it's so interesting. It makes what happened look much more like a return to the mean as Obama leaves the stage than a Trump surge.
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I'm a currently very depressed American who is (bizarrely) looking like a bit of a genius for living overseas for the past 19 years (14 here in NZ). I have no plans to return there.
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The atlantic had a good article on measuring the effects of voter suppression
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/north-carolina-early-voting/506963/
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Greg Akehurst, in reply to
Russell, does that imply that around 10 million fewer voters actually voted? What was the overall turnout %? Also, how did Trump and his advisers know that the electorate would respond in the way it did, that white women would vote in such numbers for him, when everyone else appears to have missed it? Are they as surprised as we are?
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Russell Brown, in reply to
Are they as surprised as we are?
I've seen some reports suggesting they are.
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I find it passing strange that (only slightly radical) left agendas are totally out of the question and electoral poison, but seriously radical right wing nonsense like this is fine and dandy.
The Democrats shot themselves (and the rest of us) in the foot with their bland neo-liberal managerialism. Sounds a bit familiar ...
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Aidan, in reply to
The U.S. debt to China is $1.185 trillion, as of August 2016
That's we call a hell of a bargaining chip.
Nope. If you don't believe me ...
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/08/the-china-debt-fizzle/
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