@ungoliantschilde / ungoliantschilde.tumblr.com
a full explanation and backdrop of the 2008 financial crisis, how it impacted the election of Barrack Obama, and how it lead to the rise of Donald Trump.
It’s an hour and half. I listened to it on my headphones while I was working. It’s fascinating and appalling at the same time. Give it a listen if you have the time and patience.
I never really learned history or government or politics because I couldn’t understand it, so this is definitely a dumb question but why can’t the president of the US bring back all the troops that are stationed abroad? I know we’re in a lot of these countries because of oil but on paper what are we doing there? Would it be so bad to just “we’re gonna leave now, bye”?
I imagine it would take a lot of time to answer, feel free to abbreviate (but I would really appreciate a long reply/links). Thanks so much!
Hi there! A President is Commander in Chief, so he absolutely could deploy and bring back troops at will without any need to get Congress's permission. Aside from our economic interests in the area, I've heard many people argue that suddenly pulling out our presence from the Middle East would destabilize the region and leave our allies vulnerable. I've gotten the impression from listening to politicians over the years that that they favor us withdrawing but fear we've been there too long to suddenly pull back without consequences or a resurgence of terrorist groups. Many favor a gradual withdrawal instead. I think recent presidents have tried to work to do that, but some new threat emerged that they feel necessitated us to stay longer and/or they eventually made it less a priority. I am definitely not a foreign policy expert and am not arguing for or against deployment overseas, merely sharing what little I've learned myself. :)
All due respect to LadyHistory, because I LOVE your blog.
It took a long time to understand this, and I feel grateful for the opportunity to explain it in this format. The reason we are in these countries is not just “because of oil”. That is an overly simplistic answer. It’s true. It’s 100% true. But it’s missing the details, and the details are the answer to your question.
People from Europe that come to the US are sometimes under the impression that it’s easy to see all kinds of stuff in the US in one trip. A foot tour of Manhattan - and only Manhattan, none of the outer Burroughs - could be a whole week with a good guide. That’s just one city, and it’s a major tourist attraction.
Now. I live in Missouri, on a farm. We grow corn and soy beans. Every piece of equipment out here runs on either gasoline or diesel. Solar power and wind power are novelties that don’t actually work hard enough or long enough for us to use them and make money. When you farm, equipment breaks. That is part of the deal. You figure it into your expenses. When a tractor breaks, it costs more than money. It costs time. And that means I have spent many long nights driving all over the state, or even out of state for parts, because we are trying to get the harvest done on time. I spend hours a day in a tractor, or hours a day in my truck going to get parts for the tractors.
Why am I talking about farming?
Because the product of our farming is part of what the United States exports to other countries. International Trade. We get to have gasoline for - right now, I think it was $2.25 a gallon in town.
In London, UK - it is currently $5.79 a gallon. More than double what we pay. 
If you think about it... a brand new Ford Mustang was like, $6500.00 or something in the mid 70s, and gasoline was *famously* $.75 a gallon. Today, a Mustang is $40k, easy. And Gas is only $2.25.
Our relationships with countries that are ideologically appalling to most Americans - like Saudi Arabia, for example - are due to trade negotiations.
Which brings us to the military. The United States Armed Forces are... mind boggling powerful. Google what it is like to fight us. There is a Reddit thread on what it feels like to fight the US Military, and the general consensus I got was “overwhelming”. Now, from a trade standpoint, that is a REALLY good bargaining tool to bring to the table.
Especially when most of the industry involved in exporting US goods -like farming- relies upon the fundamental basis that gasoline is $2.25 a gallon right now.
So, to answer you directly, our military is deployed to other countries because it maintains our economy, and the president doesn’t pull them back because that would be renegging on multiple trade deals that we will never know about unless they get broken and then we’d all be pretty fucked.
If you work for 12 hours every day, 7 days a week with no time off. At $10.10 per hour your yearly earnings would be $44,238.
after Taxes, it's more like $36,500.00
Anyone interested in geographic economics and regionalism will find this new study from Garrett Dash Nelson and Alasdair Rae fascinating. The authors used an algorithmic approach to identify the megaregions of the US based on commute data. It demonstrates that in almost all areas of the country, the current political borders are not a good reflection of the economic interests of the inhabitants.
Garrett Dash Nelson and Alasdair Rae, An Economic Geography of the United States: From Commutes to Megaregions
The emergence in the United States of large-scale “megaregions” centered on major metropolitan areas is a phenomenon often taken for granted in both scholarly studies and popular accounts of contemporary economic geography. This paper uses a data set of more than 4,000,000 commuter flows as the basis for an empirical approach to the identification of such megaregions. We compare a method which uses a visual heuristic for understanding areal aggregation to a method which uses a computational partitioning algorithm, and we reflect upon the strengths and limitations of both. We discuss how choices about input parameters and scale of analysis can lead to different results, and stress the importance of comparing computational results with “common sense” interpretations of geographic coherence. The results provide a new perspective on the functional economic geography of the United States from a megaregion perspective, and shed light on the old geographic problem of the division of space into areal units.
Note the NYC region – where I live – where the political boundary between NY state and New Jersey (and a speck of Pennsylvania) are shown to be irrelevant, and in fact, problematic: consider Governor Christie’s blocking the construction of new tunnels from NJ to NYC, for example.
The NY-Connecticut border stands out as one of the few borders that show up algorithmically, which the authors suggest indicates some border-related economic barrier to commuting: perhaps the NYC tax system, where those that commute to work in NYC have to pay city taxes as well as to the state?
Also note that the High Plains lack enough commute data to warrant even a name on their new partitioning.
In a perfect future world, political boundaries would be fluid, not fixed. The residents of the NYC region, for example, would have an equal voice in issues that affect them equally, and those outside the region – like those in the new megaregions of Upstate NY and Philly – would have little say.
The longer that old political boundaries persist – reflecting dictates of long-dead kings, or the expansion west a hundred years ago or more – the greater the societal costs for their inflexibility and their mismatch with actual economic reality.
I’d like to see the analysis carried out at a finer granularity, so that the ‘counties’ and ‘cities’ of the new ‘state’ of New York City could be determined in the same way, as opposed to political considerations of decades or centuries ago.
One last observation: handing over the political geography to an algorithm will likely be a political plank in future elections, taking away the lever of gerrymandering based on political parties, and determining voting districts based on human activity and connection.
I don’t want to rehash the recent presidential elections, but I wonder how these regions would have voted, and what allocation of electoral votes they would have had. Don’t you?
beautiful work
