• Welcome to OGBoards 10.0, keep in mind that we will be making LOTS of changes to smooth out the experience here and make it as close as possible functionally to the old software, but feel free to drop suggestions or requests in the Tech Support subforum!

Roughly 3 weeks into Trump as PEOTUS...

Looks like one of the recounts is now called off. Another swing and a miss.
 
Barack Obama will retire a president personally popular with the American people yet who served them (and himself, and his party) badly.

He fretted in 2012 that he would lose the election just in time for Mitt Romney to get credit for an Obama recovery. That long-delayed recovery is finally coming in the last months of his administration—the economy finally broke 3% growth in the third quarter—and now Mr. Trump will get the credit.

He may even deserve a bit, witness the outbreak of Trumpian optimism in the stock market and small-business hiring plans.

Mr. Obama came in saying fossil fuels were running out and prices were destined to rise, and instead got the fracking revolution, whose related employment boost was arguably a factor in his re-election victories in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Yet he couldn’t stop looking this gift horse in the mouth.

Unshrewdly, in the name of satisfying his climate-change constituents, he needlessly launched a regulatory war against coal as cheap natural gas was already doing the job for him. Result: Democrats became the enemy in coal country.

He pandered to his green friends on the Keystone XL pipeline. Result: Mr. Trump is inheriting a rebound in natural gas fracking and an associated infrastructure boom that is just now heating up again in time for an incoming administration to get credit.

MORE BUSINESS WORLD

Trump Rally vs. Bannonomics Dec. 2, 2016
Shoreline Gentry Are Fake Climate Victims Nov. 26, 2016
Living With Donald Trump’s Conflicts Nov. 22, 2016
The L.A. Dodgers Could Help Kill the AT&T Merger Nov. 18, 2016
Natural gas fracking (far more than Trumpian trade policy or browbeating of companies like Carrier) is the force reawakening manufacturing opportunity in the Rust Belt, timed perfectly for Mr. Trump’s arrival.

Holding back development was not the depressed gas price—that’s what attracts manufacturers—but the lack of infrastructure, specifically pipelines, to get the gas to prospective plant sites. Blame Mr. Obama and his Keystone theatrics.

A Brazilian company, Braskem, just opted to build a $500 million plastics plant in Texas, not Philadelphia—home to 85% Obama voters—for one reason only: lack of pipeline infrastructure.

Mr. Obama, notice, pays this price for climate gestures that were purely symbolic, having no impact on climate, and especially purblind given gas’s role in reducing U.S. CO2 emissions.

His climate gestures were destined not to survive his presidency in any case. All he did was shoot himself, his party and American workers in the foot.

Mr. Obama paid lip service to tax reform, the giant dividend from which will now be collected, yes, by Mr. Trump.

His Iran deal was supposed to reveal Mr. Obama as a bold, creative, unblinkered foreign-policy innovator. Yet, for better or worse, Mr. Trump is already on a path to revise America’s relations with the world in far more daring fashion.

One dividend may already be coming in, judging by Saudi Arabia’s surprise decision this week to wave the white flag in its price war against fracking. America is no longer a country that benefits from low oil prices. All the indicators are turning up: rig count, “frac sand” prices, the share prices of domestic energy pioneers like Chesapeake and Oneok.

A Rust Belt renaissance that might have recaptured for Democrats the lost love of the American worker will become a halo for Team Trump instead. Shell is going ahead with a $6 billion petrochemical plant on the site of an old zinc smelter on the Ohio River in hard-hit Appalachia.

The plant, known as Shell Appalachia, will generate 6,000 construction jobs for several years, plus 600 full-time plant jobs, plus thousands more jobs indirectly for companies that make plastics, steel pipe, sound proofing for gas compressors, pickup trucks, housing etc., etc.

A Thai company is eyeing a second giant ethylene plant nearby in eastern Ohio. Guess who will get credit for lifting the fortunes of a region presidents have been promising to help since Kennedy?

Mr. Obama was too blinded by his shibboleths, his own brand of political correctness, to let good things happen in a way that would let him take credit for them.

He failed to lean in favor of things that were working—like fracking, like corporate America’s steady effort to encourage more consumer involvement in disciplining health-care costs, which ObamaCare might have borrowed from.

Mr. Trump can still screw things up. His trade-war talk, his eagerness to meddle in plant-siting decisions, could be poisonous to a gas-fueled manufacturing boom conspicuously linked to the world.

Fully 60% of the $170 billion in planned petrochemical investments tied to fracking now in the works are funded by overseas investors. These investors come because they think of America as a lawful, trustworthy place to do business.

But Mr. Trump, our new dealmaker-in-chief, also has a pragmatic streak as big as Manhattan’s Trump Tower. He will make mistakes but here’s betting they won’t be Mr. Obama’s mistakes of smug obliviousness.
 
DeacMan said:
With all due respect, I really am not going to get into all the ways Obama is the anti-thesis of pragmatic. Obama has a lot of good qualities. Pragmatism, at least from my standpoint, was not remotely on that list. As someone who has spent his entire career in academia, you simply are not going to grasp things from the same framework as me. And having debated with you for years I also know full well you won't acknowledge what you can't see. And that's fine.
Click to expand...

+1
 
knowell said:
It is quite enjoyable to read the board left losing its mind about Trump. Definitely shows they don't get it at all.

Personally, I think Trump is off to an incredibly good start. Much better than I would have thought possible for him.

The appointment of Mad Dog is genius and the public will love him. Saving the jobs for the Carrier plant is just as fantastic. He is interviewing people that hated him pre-president which shows an unexpected level of magnanimity. Stock market is in love with Trump and potential policies. The Taiwan thing: seriously guys, again the people will love him. He will speak with Taiwan or whom ever else he pleases. If China gets pissy, that's on them. He is replacing a president that thought trading five Taliban leaders for one traitor was a win and was constantly kowtowing to Iran in order to keep that rotten deal in place. It's a new world we are living in today and you guys need to recognize.

Trump is totally kicking ass and apparently the left is freaking out. So worth the price of admission and we may even get a kick ass economy out of it.

Life is good.
Click to expand...

+1
 
I don't understand the "liberals don't get Trump" argument. I think they get him perfectly and are terrified about what he's going to do to the country.
 
Strickland33 said:
There are other ways to make jobs for Americans, ways that embrace the new information economy or sustainable energy (rather than reject it outright), that don't involve unsustainable and environmentally devastating jobs that will disappear within the decade anyway.

This country has lost all sense of imagination. Political and otherwise.

ETA: I'm not implying that this is a partisan issue, either.
Click to expand...

This is probably worth a thread of it's own. I agree 100% with the sentence.

http://theweek.com/articles/659087/election-that-forgot-about-future

Our politics have ceded the future to the market and Silicon Valley. The question of social organization, presumably, has been mostly solved by the wonks. Liberal democracies are increasingly convinced that there is no innovation in political thinking allowed. We simply adjust the levers of policy at appropriate times, and focus on atoning for past sins. The global elite is converging on economic integration, low trade barriers, universal benefits, light regulation, and the cultivation of a global class of politicians and plutocrats who socialize and groom each other and their children for continued benevolent rule. Sometimes, in their darker moments, they cede the future to China, thinking that some kind of autocratic capitalism might produce better trains and faster growing cities.

And again, this is not surprising, Two baby boomer candidates were almost always going to settle into the two default positions. One would represent those who felt they lost something of the vim and promise of their youth. And another would naturally represent those who are mostly satisfied with the work their generation has done, who generally admire the distribution of rewards in our society, but wouldn't mind more credit themselves.

A normal age would produce a culture of letters that recognizes this for what it is: exhaustion on a deep level.

Our politics are obsessed with the past because we aren't invested in the future the way a normal society should be. So we hardly imagine what we might build. We live on credit in the somewhat secure knowledge that our creditors can't collect even if they were to rob our graves. Like the Clintons, our elites live with dual incomes and one kid. And we search for ways to do good, when the getting's good for us too. Like Donald Trump, we're hoping to stick some nameless others with our moral and financial debt.

This pattern of life — a life oriented to no future at all — will end soon, because it is unsustainable. And because, if we can bear to look, it disgusts us.
Click to expand...
 
It's also ridiculous the how much the narrative of the entire country depends on how 150,000 votes in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan went. Out of the hundreds of millions cast. We're still the exact same country if those votes go the other way
 
knowell said:
It is quite enjoyable to read the board left losing its mind about Trump. Definitely shows they don't get it at all.

Personally, I think Trump is off to an incredibly good start. Much better than I would have thought possible for him.

The appointment of Mad Dog is genius and the public will love him. Saving the jobs for the Carrier plant is just as fantastic. He is interviewing people that hated him pre-president which shows an unexpected level of magnanimity. Stock market is in love with Trump and potential policies. The Taiwan thing: seriously guys, again the people will love him. He will speak with Taiwan or whom ever else he pleases. If China gets pissy, that's on them. He is replacing a president that thought trading five Taliban leaders for one traitor was a win and was constantly kowtowing to Iran in order to keep that rotten deal in place. It's a new world we are living in today and you guys need to recognize.

Trump is totally kicking ass and apparently the left is freaking out. So worth the price of admission and we may even get a kick ass economy out of it.

Life is good.
Click to expand...

Well we knew you were a knob-slobber. You arent even true to your supposed libertarianism. It's jhmd that surprises me.
 
WakeandBake said:
Well we knew you were a knob-slobber. You arent even true to your supposed libertarianism. It's jhmd that surprises me.
Click to expand...

You have been a lost little boy for the past 4 weeks now. All of your post have been whinny and clueless. I expected much better from you.

I am well aware that Trump is no libertarian, but I will give credit where credit is due. He is a fantastical blowhard, but is off to a great start and all you guys can see is a guy bumbling all over the stage.
He may well screw up the whole world before it's all over, but at this point, aside from a couple of ridiculous tweets, he is miles ahead of expectations.

If things continue for 8 years as well as they have gone the first few weeks, you might as well go ahead and commission someone to carve a 5th face on Mount Rushmore.
 
MysteryMen said:
It's also ridiculous the how much the narrative of the entire country depends on how 150,000 votes in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan went. Out of the hundreds of millions cast. We're still the exact same country if those votes go the other way
Click to expand...

It's simply just a matter of liberals who got cute and voted for Jill Stein or write-ins actually bothering to vote for Hillary. They changed the entire narrative.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top