US election 2020

[Pies4shaw]

[Sicks Bux]

How are we feeling about President Kamala Harris? Because she'll probably be taking over from Biden before the end of his first term.

[David]

Nothing too much – she seems like a typical Democrat, for better and for worse. I think it'll be a milestone worth celebrating for the US to finally have a female president, and she should be a fairly safe pair of hands as US leaders go (I also suspect that she will be a somewhat more socially progressive president than her own past as a hardline prosecutor would suggest). I do worry that her foreign policy will be more aggressive than Obama's, but probably no better or worse than Biden’s will be.

[Sicks Bux]

^Sounds awful.

[David]

I think it helps to have extremely low expectations and be pleasantly surprised by anything good that happens.

[What'sinaname]

[Sicks Bux]

I see our poll has Trump & Biden neck and neck.Were we on the money or what?

[Lazza]

[David]

Just like having a black president reduced racism?

[think positive]

he tried but he knew just like guns, the mountain is too high, he did help the LGBT cause though, and a small piece from the link below, so maybe a She can help the race problems: a good read:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38536668

"His election triumph is 2008 was also misinterpreted as an act of national atonement for the original sin of slavery and the stain of segregation.

Yet Obama did not win the election because he was a black man. It was primarily because a country facing an economic crisis and embroiled in two unpopular wars was crying out for change.

Doubtless there have been substantive reforms. His two black attorneys general, Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, have revitalised the work of the justice department's civil rights division, which was dormant during the Bush years.

The Affordable Healthcare Act, or Obamacare, as it was inevitably dubbed, cut the black uninsured rate by a third.

Partly in a bid to reverse the rate of black incarceration, he has commuted the sentences of hundreds of prisoners - 10 times the number of his five predecessors added together.

As well as calling for the closure of private prisons, he became the first president to visit a federal penitentiary. "There but for the grace of God," said a man who had smoked pot and dabbled with cocaine in his youth."

[Lazza]

[pietillidie]

This is pathetic even if by late postal votes and judicial miracle Biden falls over the line. The problems for the US are bad enough: division and instability, managerial and governmental incompetence, open corruption, wealth gap blowout, worsening healthcare, pretend jobs and promises that never materialise and make people even angrier, rising fascist and fundamentalist ideology, etc.

But the problems for the rest of us risk spiralling out of control:

1. Global economic suppression to pay for the idiot's mismanagement, which is an immediate loss out of our pockets, but which will continue after a vaccine (meanwhile crushing developing economies and making them less stable);

2. Emboldened crazies and populist hacks like Johnson in the UK and authoritarians like Bolsonaro and Duda, proliferating destructive decisions and bad actors;

3. A complete wrecking of global coordination, meaning Coronavirus will continue to destabilise the world in the near-term, while global warming, species loss, and fossil fuels conflict worsen; and

4. A strengthening of the position of Chinese hardliners as they leverage Trump's destructive protectionism, appalling character and flaky dabbling as cover for pretty much anything.

China's hardliners being strengthened by Trump is one thing, but the US itself is now a complete menace. It's increasingly obvious that the rest of the world needs to decouple from it and then quarantine its impact. It's a bloody nightmare of a place.