US Politics Mega-thread - Page 6597

President-elect Donald Trump's repeated attacks on Mexican auto imports has collapsed the peso — which has ironically made Mexico a more inviting location for American manufacturers.

Trump has repeatedly warned automakers they could be hit with a 35 percent tariff on imports, but some observers believe such threats could actually make it more attractive to invest south of the border.

Several high-level auto industry officials told NBC News that a sharp slump in the price of the peso could more than offset any import tariffs, leading them to consider new Mexican manufacturing options. The unexpected consequence was highlighted by former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers during a speech on Wednesday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

"The decline in the peso is a dagger at Ohio," said Summers, who served in the Clinton administration from 1999 through 2001. "It is a major change in the relative attractiveness of locating production activity in Mexico versus locating it in the American heartland."
...
The threats have wreaked havoc on the Mexican economy. And the peso has collapsed. It is currently trading at nearly 22 to the American dollar, compared to 18 on election day. And that was already down sharply from the beginning of the year, as Mexican trade became an election hot-button issue.

"Compared to when we built our (last) plant in Mexico," the peso has fallen by almost half," said a CEO of a major foreign automaker's U.S. operations. "It makes me think about the opportunity of adding more there," he said, noting that, "this would probably offset any tariff they might impose."

Summers is by no means the only one worrying that a Trump tariff could be seriously counterproductive. A study released last week by the Center for Automotive Research warned that eliminating or sharply scaling back on NAFTA could seriously impact the U.S. auto industry, especially in the American Midwest, where much of its manufacturing still takes place.

"Counter to the incoming Trump administration's goal of creating manufacturing jobs, the withdrawal from NAFTA or the implementation of punitive tariffs could result in the loss of 31,000 U.S. jobs," said a summary of the report by CAR, a highly respected automotive research firm in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

On January 20 2017 08:40 LegalLord wrote:
I honestly think the US would do well to promote a more stable Mexico. Trump probably will set things back on that front - unless Mexico cons a better NAFTA out of him.

By the way, the official investigations didn't make a decision, but I'm curious what you folk think: did Wikileaks's involvement win Trump the election? Or for the "it was a lot of things" smartasses, if the leaks never happened, would Trump have won?

WASHINGTON ― Part of being a great president is showing off America’s military strength, according to President-elect Donald Trump.

The military “may come marching down Pennsylvania Avenue,” Trump told the Washington Post in an interview published Wednesday. “That military may be flying over New York City and Washington, D.C., for parades. I mean, we’re going to be showing our military.”

Trump spoke about his vision of military parades in vague terms, suggesting it was something he might oversee in the future. But according to several sources involved in his inaugural preparations, Trump has endeavored to ensure that his first day as commander-in-chief is marked by an unusual display of heavy military equipment.

During the preparation for Friday’s transfer-of-power, a member of Trump’s transition team floated the idea of including tanks and missile launchers in the inaugural parade, a source involved in inaugural planning told The Huffington Post. “They were legit thinking Red Square/North Korea-style parade,” the source said, referring to massive military parades in Moscow and Pyongyang, typically seen as an aggressive display of muscle-flexing.

The military, which traditionally works closely with the presidential inaugural committee, shot down the request, the source said. Their reason was twofold. Some were concerned about the optics of having tanks and missile launchers rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue. But they also worried that the tanks, which often weigh over 100,000 pounds, would destroy the roads.

“I could absolutely see structural support being a reason [not to use tanks],” a Department of Defense official said. “D.C. is built on a swamp to begin with.”

Defense Department spokeswoman Valerie Henderson declined to comment on the request for tanks and missile launchers, referring questions to the Trump transition team. Trump advisor Boris Epshteyn told HuffPost that the presidential inaugural committee worked closely with the military “to render appropriate honors” for Trump’s swearing-in. But he directed questions about “specific aspects” of the military’s support to the Defense Department.

The Pentagon didn’t reject all of Trump’s ideas. At the request of the president-elect, there are five military flyovers ― one for each branch of the armed services ― planned for Friday’s inaugural parade, Pentagon spokesman Maj. Jamie Davis told HuffPost.

On January 20 2017 07:46 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:


Out of curiosity, do you think Betsy DeVos is qualified to be Secretary of Education? (And did you watch her hearing/ hear her answers?) Because I hear responses like "She was nominated because she agrees with Trump" and that may be true, but that's very different than her being qualified.

The Sharp Sword UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle), China's stealthy attack drone, just won second place in the National Science and Technology Advancement Prizes. Considering the secrecy surrounding stealth drones to come out of China—there are relatively few photos of the Sharp Sword available, particularly as opposed to, say, the J-20 fighter—the Sharp Sword's victory is pretty noteworthy. The drone, known as "Lijian" in Mandarin Chinese, is being paraded as a huge win for Chinese aviation technology. And it is.

The Sharp Sword is the first non-NATO stealthy unmanned combat aerial vehicle (UCAV). Built by Aviation Industry Corporation of China, with much of the work done by the Hongdu Aviation Industry Group, the Sharp Sword first flew in November 2013. Looking a bit like a mini-B-2 flying wing bomber, the UCAV has two internal bomb bays and a likely payload of about 4,400 pounds. Its engine is a non-afterburning WS-13 turbofan engine, with serpentine inlet to hide the engine from enemy radars (the first Sharp Sword does not use a stealthy nozzle due to its technology demonstrator status). It has a length of about 33 feet, and a wingspan of about 46 feet.

Other similar foreign systems include the American X-47B, the British Taranis, and the French Neuron. Stealthy UCAVs have a number of advantages over their manned counterparts: they can fit the same internal payload onto a smaller airframe, and have much longer ranges, in addition to the typical advantages of unmanned aerial vehicles, like longer flight times.

Reporting from the Chinese Internet suggests that a second, even stealthier Sharp Sword began flying last year (with a stealthy engine). If flight testing with the prototypes goes as well as the initial flight tests did with the first airframe, the Sharp Sword could enter service as early as 2019-2020.

Initially, it's believed that the Sharp Sword will be used for reconnaissance in areas with dense air defense networks, as well as tailing foreign warships. As the Chinese develops a familiarity with the Sharp Sword, it could be used for combat operations as a "first through the door" weapon against highly defended, high-value targets, as well as an aerial tanker for other drones and carrier aircraft (akin to plans for the U.S. MQ-25). There is even the possibility of carrier version for China's planned next generation of catapult equipped aircraft carriers.

Eventually, advances in distributed systems and artificial intelligence could help the Sharp Sword be a robotic wingman to manned aircraft in an unmanned/manned operational concept. It could even take on autonomous missions of its own.

On January 20 2017 08:51 LegalLord wrote:
It probably had the most effect on people like Mohdoo: left-leaning idealists who would be on board with Hillary, but kind of barely so, and that would push them over the edge. Remember, though, that Trump won by a thin margin made of mostly Bernie strongholds.

Podesta probably just contributed to the "Hillary is corrupt" narrative that eroded her lead at the end. For me, I just enjoyed reading the GS speeches to get some very pointed insights into her FP approach.

(CNN)A pastor with a long history of inflammatory remarks about Muslims, Mormons, Catholics and gays is scheduled to preach at a private service for President-elect Trump and his family on Friday, shortly before Trump takes the oath of office.

The pastor, the Rev. Robert Jeffress, is a Southern Baptist who vigorously campaigned for Trump during the final months of the presidential election and is a member of his evangelical advisory board. "I love this guy!" Trump has said of Jeffress. Before the campaign, Trump, a Presbyterian, had no apparent connection to the pastor, who leads First Baptist Church in Dallas.
...
Jeffress leads a 12,000-member megachurch in Dallas and is a frequent guest on Fox News. But to many Americans, he may be best known for his frequent condemnations of Mormonism as a "cult" during the 2012 presidential campaign. He urged Christians not to vote for Mitt Romney, a Mormon, during the Republican primary. He later supported Romney over President Barack Obama.

Jeffress has also called Islam and Mormonism heresies "from the pit of hell," suggested that the Catholic church was led astray by Satan, accused Obama of "paving the way" for the Antichrist and spread false statistics about the prevalence of HIV among gays, who he said live a "miserable" and "filthy" lifestyle.
In recent years, Jeffress has frequently denounced Islam, calling it an "evil religion" that "promotes pedophilia" because the Prophet Muhammed married a 9-year-old girl. (Many modern Muslim scholars disagree about her age.) The pastor has also said that Mormons, Muslims and Hindus "worship a false god."

...

Even though the service will be private, Jeffress is an unusual choice to preach on Inauguration Day, an occasion when incoming presidents often try to unite the country's diverse religious and social strands. In 2013, the Rev. Louie Giglio, an evangelical pastor, withdrew from Obama's inauguration ceremony after an outcry about a sermon on homosexuality he had preached in the 1990s.

“Don’t make any sudden moves” is the advice offered to the new president by Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations, which has not traditionally been known as a beer hall of populist beliefs.

Haass meant the president should bring his National Security Council together to anticipate the consequences before tearing up the Iran nuclear deal, moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem or shooting down a missile being tested by Kim Jong-Un.

In arguing against rash action, Haass is correct.

Where the CFR and the establishment are wrong, and Donald Trump is right, however, is in recognizing the new world we have entered.

The old order is passing away. Treaties and alliances dating from the Cold War are ceasing to be relevant and cannot long be sustained.

Economic patriotism and ethnonationalism, personified by Trump, seem everywhere ascendant. Transnationalism is yielding to tribalism.

The greater danger for President Trump is that the movement he led will be abandoned, its hopes dashed, and the agenda that Trump rejected and routed will be reimposed by a Republican Establishment and its collaborators in politics and the press.

Again, it was Trump who read the nation right, which is why he is taking the oath today.

The existential threat to the West no longer comes from the East, from a Russian army crashing through Poland and Germany and driving for the Elbe and Fulda Gap.

The existential threat to the West comes, instead, from the South.

The billion-plus peoples of the Maghreb, Middle East and sub-Sahara, whose numbers are exploding, are moving inexorably toward the Med, coming to occupy the empty places left by an aging and dying Europe, all of whose native-born populations steadily shrink.

American’s bleeding border is what concerns Americans, not the borders of Estonia, South Korea, Kuwait or the South China Sea.

When Trump calls NATO “obsolete,” he is saying that the great threat to the West is not Putin’s recapture of a Crimea that belonged to Russia for 150 years. And if the price of peace is getting out of Russia’s face and Russia’s space, maybe we should pay it.

George Kennan himself, the architect of Cold War containment of Stalin’s Russia, admonished us not to move NATO to Russia’s border.

Of Brexit, the British decision to leave the EU, Trump said this week, “People, countries want their own identity, and the U.K. wanted its own identity … so if you ask me, I believe others will leave.”

Is he not right? Is it so shocking to hear a transparent truth?

How could Europe’s elites not see the populist forces rising? The European peoples wished to regain their lost sovereignty and national identity, and they were willing to pay a price to achieve it.

Apparently, the Davos crowd cannot comprehend people who believe there are more important things than wealth.

Yet while President Trump should avoid rash actions, if he is to become a transformational president, he will spurn an establishment desperately seeking to hold onto the world that is passing away.

Article V of the NATO treaty may require us to treat a Russian move in the Baltic as an attack on the United States. But no sane president will start a war with a nuclear-armed Russia over Estonia.

No Cold War president would have dreamed of so rash an action.

Rather than risk such a war, Ike refused to send a rifle or bullet to the heroic Hungarian rebels in 1956. Painful, but Ike put America first, just as Trump pledged to do.

And given the strength of ethnonationalism in Europe, neither the eurozone nor the EU is likely to survive the decade. We should prepare for that day, not pretend that what is taking place across Europe, and indeed worldwide, is some passing fever of nationalism.

Notwithstanding Secretary of State-designate Rex Tillerson’s diktat, the United States is not going to force China to vacate the fortified reefs in a South China Sea she claims as her national territory.

Stick to that demand, and we best prepare for war.

As for the Taiwan card, it was played in 1972 by Richard Nixon as the price of his opening to China. Four decades ago, Jimmy Carter cut diplomatic ties to Taiwan and terminated our security pact.

For Xi Jinping to accept that Taiwan might be negotiable would mean an end of him and the overthrow of his Communist Party of China.

The Chinese will fight to prevent a permanent loss of Taiwan.

The imperative of the new era is that the great nuclear powers – China, Russia, the United States – not do to each other what Britain, France and Germany did to each other a century ago over a dead archduke.

President Trump should build the wall, secure the border, impose tariffs, cut taxes, free up the American economy, bring the factories home, create millions of jobs and keep us out of any new wars.

With rare exceptions, wars tend to be fatal to presidencies.

On January 20 2017 10:45 LegalLord wrote:
The most significant trend I saw in the last few days that R-leaning third party voters ultimately came out for Trump. They probably just saw that if they voted against Trump they would be electing Clinton by proxy, no matter what message they intended to send.

On January 20 2017 12:37 xDaunt wrote:
Pat Buchanan has something for all of you on the Left who are having difficulty understanding Trump's foreign policy:



Source.

On January 20 2017 09:05 xDaunt wrote:

I haven't looked at her record in detail or watched the confirmation hearing, but given her extensive history of working with education-related nonprofits at the state and national level, she probably is qualified.