Who are Reince Priebus and Stephen Bannon?
November 15th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
Now that the world is having to come to terms with the election of Donald Trump as the President-elect of the United States, there is intense interest in whom he is going to appoint to advise him and serve in his cabinet.
We have the first two names: Reince Priebus, 44 year old Chairman of the Republican National Committee, will be Chief of Staff and Stephen Bannon, 62 year old Executive Chairman of the website Beitbart News, will become Chief Strategist and Senior Counsellor.
Priebus is a Washington insider and mainstream Republican figure (not that this will reassure Democrats and liberals), but Bannon is an extreme figure seen as a leader of the so-called “alt-right” movement whose appointment has created a range of reactions from deep worry to outright terror. It is unclear how well these two – whom Trump calls “equal partners” – will work together in office. But these are names we will hear a lot and people we need to understand.
You can find profiles of the two men and selected quotes from them here.
Posted in American current affairs | Comments (0)
Word of the day: syzygy
November 14th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
In astronomy, a syzygy (from the Ancient Greek suzugos meaning, “yoked together”) is a straight-line configuration of three celestial bodies in a gravitational system.
The word is often used in reference to the Sun, Earth, and either the Moon or a planet, where the latter is in conjunction or opposition.
Such a configuration explains why this evening we will experience a phenomenon known as a “super moon” when the moon will be the closest to Earth since 1948 (the year of my birth). More information here.
Posted in Cultural issues, Science & technology | Comments (0)
A review of the new sci-fi movie “Arrival”
November 12th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
If there is life on other planets, the laws of physics suggest that they’ll never make it here. But, if they do, the big problem will be communication. This is the issue at the heart of “Arrival” which has had great reviews but left me disappointed. You can read my review here.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
U.S. presidential election (37): why the Electoral College should be scrapped and why it won’t be
November 11th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
The counting is not quite over in the US presidential election but it looks as if Donald Trump won a comfortable majority in the Electoral College but Hillary Clinton won 200,000 or so more votes nationwide. How can this be? It’s because of how the Electoral College works.
The President is not elected directly by the voters but by an Electoral College representing each state on the basis of a combination of the number of members in the Senate (two for each state regardless of size) and the number of members in the House of Representatives (roughly proportional to population). The District of Columbia, which has no voting representation in Congress, has three Electoral College votes. In effect, therefore, the Presidential election is not one election but 51.
The total Electoral College vote is 538. This means that, to become President, a candidate has to win at least 270 electoral votes. The voting system awards the Electoral College votes from each state to delegates committed to vote for a certain candidate in a “winner take all” system, with the exception of Maine and Nebraska (which award their Electoral College votes according to Congressional Districts rather than for the state as a whole).
This system of election means that a candidate can win the largest number of votes nationwide but fail to win the largest number of votes in the Electoral College and therefore fail to become President. Indeed, in practice, this has happened four times in US history: 1876, 1888, 2000 and now 2016.
If this seems strange (at least to non-Americans), the explanation is that the ‘founding fathers’ who drafted the American Constitution did not wish to give too much power to the people and so devised a system that gives the ultimate power of electing the President to members of the Electoral College. The same Constitution, however, enables each state to determine how its members in the Electoral College are chosen and since the 1820s states have chosen their electors by a direct vote of the people. The United States is the only example in the world of an indirectly elected executive president.
In the event that the Electoral College is evenly divided between two candidates or no candidate secures a majority of the votes, the constitution provides that the choice of President is made by the House of Representatives and the choice of Vice-President is made by the Senate. In the first case, the representatives of each state have to agree collectively on the allocation of a single vote. In the second case, each senator has one vote.
Clearly the Electoral College is utterly inappropriate to the modern age and it has delivered the ‘wrong’ result in two of the last four elections. Opinion polls show substantial support for a direct presidential election. So the system should be changed, right? It won’t be though because a change will require an amendment to the US Constitution and, in the current divisive political situation of the USA, any substantive change to the Constitution is effectively impossible to achieve.
Of course, the Constitution could be changed – but this is really difficult. First, a proposed amendment has to secure a two-thirds vote of members present in both houses of Congress. Then three-quarters of the state legislatures have to ratify the proposed change (this stage may or may not be governed by a specific time limit). Even the Equal Rights Amendment failed to meet these thresholds after a 10 year process.
There have been 27 amendments to the US Constitution (although one was simply a repeal of another). The first 10 amendments – constituting the Bill of Rights – were taken together shortly after the drafting of the original Constitution. Of the other 17 (effectively 16), one was the abolition of slavery, but this took half a century and a bloody civil war. Other amendments brought about woman’s suffrage (1920) and votes for those aged 18 (1971), but these were simply measures introduced about the same time in other democratic states.
My proposition is that any constitutional change that is controversial – for instance, longer terms for Congressmen or strong controls on election expenditure or effective controls on gun ownership or abolition of the Electoral College– is effectively impossible to achieve. This makes the US Constitution the oldest and most inflexible in the world and in large part explains why the US political system is dysfunctional and will remain so.
Posted in American current affairs | Comments (7)
U.S. presidential election (36): stop the world, I wanna get off
November 9th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
I spent the whole of last night at the Marylebone Sports Bar and Grill in central London with a few hundred Americans resident in Britain – all Democrats wanting a victory by Hillary Clinton. I arrived about 10.15 pm and stayed until the place closed at 5.30 am, so it was 6.20 am before I reached my bed.
It was a noisy affair with so many excited people and dozens of screens showing live coverage of the election results on CNN. I tweeted 11 times in the course of the evening. All my tweets come up on my Facebook page and I received a number of comments from friends in both the UK and the USA who had also stayed up for the results.
It was a surprising and depressing result. The polls got it completely wrong and across the democratic world we are finding that political polling is much less accurate than it was.
Donald Trump’s victory is astonishing. For someone who has never held elected office, has such a chequered business career, did not publish his tax returns, insulted almost every demographic constituent in the election, was so extreme in his policies when they were clear, and was so vague about his policies in so many crucial areas, for this person to beat one of the most experienced politicians ever to run for the White House is simply breathtaking.
For those, like me, who vehemently opposed his candidature but wishes America and the world well, we have to hope that he will pull back from many of his more extreme positions in the face of the realities of power and that he will appoint experienced and wise colleagues who will be able and ready to counsel him. We have to hope this because his tenure will profoundly affect the whole world and we have nowhere else to go.
There’s been a spike in views of my short guide to the American political system and I’ve just updated it to take account of the election result.
Posted in American current affairs | Comments (8)
The biggest Bollywood movie you’ve never heard of
November 7th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
It’s called “Bajirao Mastani”. See, I told you that you’ve never heard of it.
But it was mega in India and it’s certainly worth tracking down. You can read my review here.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
U.S. presidential election (35): the world holds its breath
November 7th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
Tomorrow is polling day in a US presidential election which is widely judged to have been the most bitter and divisive in modern times. In fact, about a third of the ballots likely to be cast have already been made in early voting. That is at least 41 million votes across 48 states.
The latest polls show Clinton leading Trump by 48% to 43% (Washington Post/ABC), 44% to 40% (NBC/Wall Street Journal), and 45% to 42% (Politico/Morning Consult). So Clinton should win the most votes.
But the US President is not chosen by popular vote but by the Electoral College. According to the HuffPost Pollster database, Clinton is pretty certain of 269 electoral votes, while Trump probably has 164 in the bag. That leaves 105 up for grabs. Trump would need to win all of them to draw level with Clinton. So Clinton should win the College much more decisively than the popular vote.
But the world is holding its breath.
I’ll be staying up all night to watch the coverage of the counting and I’ll be joining a whole bunch of American Democratic activists living in London to see the story unfold.
I’ll be holding my breath.
Posted in American current affairs | Comments (2)
U.S. presidential election (34): how does the electoral college work?
November 6th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
On Tuesday, at long last, American voters go to the polls in the Presidential election – as well as the election of the whole of the House of Representatives and a third of the Congress. What non-Americans following the election need to understand is that constitutionally the President is not elected by the voters but by an Electoral College whose delegates are chosen by the voters on a state by state basis. This means that the candidate who wins the largest number of votes overall may not necessarily win the largest number of delegates in the Electoral College.
Confused? In my short guide to the American political system, I have explained the process as follows:
“The President is not elected directly by the voters but by an Electoral College representing each state on the basis of a combination of the number of members in the Senate (two for each state regardless of size) and the number of members in the House of Representatives (roughly proportional to population). The states with the largest number of votes are California (55), Texas (38) and New York (29). The states with the smallest number of votes – there are six of them – have only three votes. The District of Columbia, which has no voting representation in Congress, has three Electoral College votes. In effect, therefore, the Presidential election is not one election but 51
The total Electoral College vote is 538. This means that, to become President, a candidate has to win at least 270 electoral votes. The voting system awards the Electoral College votes from each state to delegates committed to vote for a certain candidate in a “winner take all” system, with the exception of Maine and Nebraska (which award their Electoral College votes according to Congressional Districts rather than for the state as a whole). In practice, most states are firmly Democrat – for instance, California and New York – or firmly Republican – for instance, Texas and Tennessee. Therefore, candidates concentrate their appearances and resources on the so-called “battleground states”, those that might go to either party. The three largest battleground or swing states are Florida (29 votes), Pennsylvania (20) and Ohio (18). Others are Virginia (13), Wisconsin (10), Colorado (9), Iowa (6) and Nevada (6).
This system of election means that a candidate can win the largest number of votes nationwide but fail to win the largest number of votes in the Electoral College and therefore fail to become President. Indeed, in practice, this has happened three times in US history: 1876, 1888, and 2000. If this seems strange (at least to non-Americans), the explanation is that the ‘founding fathers’ who drafted the American Constitution did not wish to give too much power to the people and so devised a system that gives the ultimate power of electing the President to members of the Electoral College. The same Constitution, however, enables each state to determine how its members in the Electoral College are chosen and since the 1820s states have chosen their electors by a direct vote of the people.
The United States is the only example in the world of an indirectly elected executive president.”
Posted in American current affairs | Comments (0)
A review of the Italian novel “The Story Of The Lost Child”
November 5th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
It’s taken me almost three months, but I’ve finally completed my summer/autumn reading project: to read the four works and 1700 pages that make up the ‘Neapolitan Novels’, an acclaimed series by the Italian author Elena Ferrante.
This is a saga of the 60-year friendship between two girls from a poor neighbourhood of Naples after the Second World War: the narrator Elena Greco, known as Lenu, who becomes an accomplished writer and Raffaella Cerullo, known as Lila, whose never leaves Naples.
The first novel in the series is called “My Brilliant Friend” and I reviewed it here. The second novel is titled “The Story Of A New Name” and you can read my review here. The third novel is “Those Who Leave And Those Who Stay” and I reviewed it here.
I’ve just concluded the fourth and final novel in the chronicle which is called “The Story Of The Lost Child” and you’ll find my review here.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
Which country does the most good for humanity?
November 5th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
You may not be surprised to hear that the answer – again – is Sweden. You might be surprised to learn that the UK comes in at 4th place. The USA is only 20th. Here are the top and bottom scorers:
The top 5:
1. Sweden
2. Denmark
3. The Netherlands
4. United Kingdom
5. Germany
The bottom 5:
159. Iraq
160. Central African Republic
161. Mauritania
162. Ecuatorial Guinea
163. Libya
These rankings come from the latest annual report of the “Good Country Index,” which ranks 163 countries by their contributions to the global community. You can check out all the scores here.
Posted in World current affairs | Comments (0)