kscarbel2

One of the biggest surprises for me about the election is I lost some respect for Giuliani. Perhaps his age is showing. He used to choose his comments well. But the quality of his comments fell, I thought, towards the end of the election.

You speak of regen issues........... I want to take this opportunity to share something. The trucks in Europe, from DAF to Mercedes-Benz, are not having any of the problems that some U.S. operators are experiencing. Trucks can and do break, but generally they're not having these problems. Why? The US truck is priced cheaper than the European truck. There's typically a 4 year lag before the US market receives new technology from Europe. And when they do, here's the nutshell, they have to reinvent it in a cheaper (lower cost) form to match up with the cheaper U.S. truck price. In summary, the U.S. market truck price is lower than Europe. The cost of all parts/components has to be tallied with still some room for profit (margin), while remaining in the competitive range. Since the US truck sells for less, either leading edge global truck technology doesn't come to the US market at all, it is delayed 3-5 years, or it arrives in a lower cost form that isn't as reliable as the European market version.

It can be easily argued that Trump is not a "successful businessman". Trump has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy no less than four times. There's an alarming pattern there, and few would argue it is the mark of a successful businessman. ------------------------------------------------- If Trump fulfills even half of his promises, that in itself will be interesting. Hundreds of times, he promised to build a wall on the US border with Mexico and deport all or many of the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants living in the country. [And rightly so.] https://www.donaldjtrump.com/policies/immigration However, in a June 2012 CNBC interview, Trump said he didn't believe in deporting undocumented immigrants who "had done a great job." "You know my views on it and I'm not necessarily, I think I'm probably down the middle on that also,” said Trump. “Because I also understand how, as an example, you have people in this country for 20 years, they've done a great job, they've done wonderfully, they've gone to school [for free], they've gotten good marks, they're productive — now we're supposed to send them out of the country, I don't believe in that. I don't believe in a lot things that are being said." He completely flipped on his "illegal immigrant" position. If they've successfully evaded capture by the INS for 20 years, they can stay ! My wife is from Norway. I had to go through the whole immigrant process with her, from green card to U.S. citizenship. Why should these illegal immigrants be allowed to cross our borders at night and stay? Why should I have gone through all the procedures for "legal" immigration, when these people can ignore our laws and receive amnesty to stay? Who's the fool? I want EVERY "illegal" immigrant deported........period. ------------------------------------------------- You should be scared. I am. Unlike the average American, I travel throughout the world. I can report to you that things are very, very bad. We particularly plunged downward from George W. Bush's tenure. America has massive issues before it, almost indescribable in scale. And, we face them without the significant edge (superiority) that we once enjoyed for decades.

Why the Elite Wanted Trump To Lose Daniel McCarthy, The National Interest / November 9, 2016 Elections pose a basic problem. Should the direction of a government be set by amateurs, by a majority or plurality mass of people who know nothing about policy detail, or should the best and brightest, the educated elite, make informed decisions for the good of everyone? Last night, the amateurs chose a new leader and a new direction for the country. Donald Trump is now president-elect. The elite thinkers of the media and policy realms are appalled. They spent months insisting that Trump was an ignorant bigot, a dangerously unstable fellow who could not be trusted with the kind of power that only they were fit to wield. The elite in both parties, among “conservative” journalists as well as “mainstream” ones, wanted Donald Trump to lose, and they confidently predicted he would. They were wrong. Trump does not have the conventional resume of a presidential aspirant. He has never held elected office. He has never served in the armed forces, either. Instead, he has been a high-profile businessman and television celebrity. His name is a brand. How does that prepare anyone to occupy the Oval Office? Trump is prone to making off-the-cuff remarks and articulating his policy themes in sometimes shockingly blunt language. This plain-spokenness and tendency toward hyperbole is perhaps as objectionable to educated elites as his policies: a good, well-educated technocrat, a polished politician, simply doesn’t use that kind of rhetoric. He has violated “norms,” and those norms—the etiquette of the elite—are sacrosanct. If this is as far as one’s analysis goes, it seems obvious that the voters are wrong to make Donald Trump president. But maybe some things are more important than credentials or elite norms: perhaps, it’s worth considering, policy results also matter—and matter rather more. Judged by the standard of her policies and their results, Hillary Clinton was evidently unfit to to be president. She voted for a Republican president’s unnecessary and wholly catastrophic war in Iraq. She urged a Democratic president to effect regime change in Libya. She has been a staunch friend to institutions of high finance that bear a large degree of responsibility for the financial crisis of 2007/8 and Great Recession. And she subscribes straight down the line to a progressive social agenda that Americans have never been willing to support when given a direct say in the matter. Gun control? Abortion? Clinton was considerably to the left on such questions. She has long been a peculiar mixture of centrist and leftist, combining many of the worst elements of each. Yet she had credentials. She followed the prescribed etiquette. And many of her screw-ups, however lethal they proved to be, were screw-ups in which other leaders in both parties shared responsibility. What Republican could criticize Clinton for her Iraq vote? How different was Clinton’s involvement with, say, Goldman Sachs from that of other politicians? Clinton’s policy faults were not faults at all in the eyes of her fellow educated elites. Indeed, as anyone who’s spent a bit of time in Washington, DC discovers, it’s professionally better to be wrong in a crowd than to be right by yourself. Clinton did not stick out. She did not make others of her class uncomfortable. George Will could have tea with her. America’s educated elite—in the academy, the media, government, and the para-governmental world of think tanks and pressure groups—has been systematically and collectively wrong about some of the biggest questions in foreign policy, economics, psychology, sociology, and culture. The best and brightest have assumed for twenty years that what every man and woman on earth most deeply desires is to become a liberal democrat. Steel workers in Pittsburgh and goat-herders in Afghanistan really in their heart of hearts yearn to be more like Washington Post op-ed columnists. What could be a higher human aspiration? The belief that comfortable, sexually satisfied consumerism, wedded to gauzy notions universal brotherhood (or sisterhood, or gender-nonspecific siblinghood), is all people want out of life has fueled the drive to integrate world markets, merge populations across borders, and dissolve the sovereignty of any state that falls short of the liberal-democratic ideal. Anyone who rejects this anthropology is irrational—much as Donald Trump is irrational—and requires education, if not medication. So bizarre and incompatible with historical humanity is this vision that all the wealth and prestige at liberalism’s disposal have not been enough to keep even Americans from demanding something else. The alternatives Trump offers are the nation-state and a vague idea of greatness—which, vague though it might be, is still rather more than what liberalism is selling. The voters who elected Trump don’t subscribe to the complex ideological formulae of Beltway apparatchiks. But they know how they feel, and they know what’s happening in their own lives. They know that being an American doesn’t seem to mean as much or promise as much as it once did. And so they want to make America great again, and Trump is the instrument at hand. They know from experience things that a Brookings scholar’s flowcharts can never reveal. A false anthropology undergirds the terrible errors that our educated leaders have made in foreign policy, economics, and governing in general. A different anthropology—hardly a completely correct one, but a more realistic one—is what informs the Trump vote, however inchoately. The amateurs know more than the experts. Donald Trump figured that out, and it’s won him the White House.

How Trump Replaced America's Globalist Consensus With A Nationalist Sensibility Robert W. Merry, The National Interest / November 9, 2016 Trump revealed through his often Quixotic campaign that millions of Americans agreed with him that the real threat came from the country’s ruling elites. The old order of American politics crumbled on Tuesday with an election that signaled an inflection point in the nation’s history. Donald Trump’s victory, almost universally considered impossible until it happened, shattered the globalist consensus of America’s governing elite and replaced it with a nationalist sensibility exemplified in the slogan, "America First." Never in the country’s history has it seen an anti-status quo, anti-establishment politician of such force and effectiveness. The globalist consensus contained a number of central tenets, all rejected by Trump. They included: — We live in a unipolar world, with America at its center as an "indispensable nation" with an imperative and mandate to dominate events and developments around the world; spread Western-style democratic capitalism; and salve the hurts and wounds of humanity in far-flung precincts of the globe. — The nation state is in decline and is being replaced by emergent multinational super-institutions such as the European Union, the United Nations and, presumably, Hillary Clinton’s proposed "hemispheric common market," with open trade and open borders. — The demands of constituent identity groups, based mostly on ethnicity and gender affiliations, are more important than any concept of national unity. — Borders have lost their significance as nationalist sentiments have receded, and while something probably needs to be done about illegal immigration, largely to assuage political pressures, there is nothing essentially wrong with mass immigration. — Free trade is an imperative in the post-Cold War era of globalization to lubricate global commerce and spur global prosperity. — Despite the advent of Islamist radicalism, fueled primarily by intense anti-Western fervor, there is no reason to believe that large numbers of Muslims can’t be assimilated into Western societies smoothly without detriment to those societies. This globalist consensus was embraced by American presidents from Bush I to Clinton I to Bush II to Obama and then to Clinton II. It was so entrenched within the top echelons of American society—the federal bureaucracy, the media, academia, big corporations, big finance, Hollywood, think tanks and charitable foundations—that hardly anyone could conceptualize any serious threat to it. Then Trump attacked it and marshalled a rowdy following of people bent on upending it. The globalist sensibility won’t go away, but it now is seriously challenged. The result is a new fault line in American politics. The Trump constituency rejects most of the central tenets of the post-Cold War consensus. Its beliefs include: — The American experiment in national building, with an attendant propensity for regime change, has been an utter failure, particularly in the Middle East, and needs to be replaced. America must be in the world but shouldn’t try to dominate it. — Nationalism is a hallowed sentiment, tied to old-fashioned patriotism, and shouldn’t be denigrated or rejected. — Identity group politics is eroding national cohesion and, through political correctness, is threatening free speech on the country’s college campuses; that threat will grow throughout society if not checked. — Borders matter; countries without clearly delineated and enforced borders soon cease to be countries. Immigration numbers should be calibrated to ensure smooth absorption and assimilation. — Free trade, as practiced in the post-Cold War era, is killing us, hollowing out the country’s industrial base and devastating its middle class. — Islamist radicalism represents a serious threat to homeland security, and it is merely prudent, therefore, to consider adjustments in immigration policy as one tool in seeking to lessen the threat. Clearly, a clash is inevitable between the post-Cold War elites and the Trump constituency. And its intensity was presaged by writer and thinker Shelby Steele in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal. Steele traced the emergence over recent decades of the view that America was a "victimizing nation," tainted by its history, particularly slavery, its treatment of its native Indian populations, and its diminishment of women and minorities. This raised a perceived imperative, in the view of many, that the country must redeem itself from its oppressive past. This could be done, writes Steele, only through a kind of deference "toward all groups with any claim to past or present victimization." But this call for deference assumed a moral high ground—and thus became a political weapon. From this moral position, the deference cadres could look down upon those who didn’t embrace the argument and stigmatize them as "regressive bigots." Writes Steele: "Mrs. Clinton, Democrats and liberals generally practice combat by stigma." He cites Clinton’s famous "basket of deplorables," those Trump followers who don’t embrace her view of America as victimizing nation. They are stigmatized as "irredeemable," subject to her sense of political correctness. "And political correctness," says Steele, "functions like a despotic regime." Then along came Trump, a thoroughly non-deferential figure, "at odds with every code of decency," who "invoked every possible stigma" and rejected each with dismissive sneers. "He did much of the dirty work," writes Steele, "that millions of Americans wanted to do but lacked the platform to do." It didn’t take long for the writer’s stigmatization concept to manifest itself in the coverage of Trump’s victory. The New York Times lead story, by Matt Flegenheimer and Michael Barbaro, revealed the dismissive bias explored by Steele. Trump, wrote Flegenheimer and Barbaro, won the presidency through a campaign "that took relentless aim at the institutions and long-held ideals of American democracy." The reporters predicted "convulsions throughout the country and the world, where skeptics had watched with alarm as Mr. Trump’s unvarnished overtures to disillusioned voters took hold." Here we see the one-sided elitist view that the post-Cold War consensus and the imperatives of deference toward victimization, past and present, constituted the only proper outlook. Rejection of it, in this view, poses a threat to the very institutions and ideals of the republic. And certainly no concept of journalistic objectivity should get in the way of exposing such nefarious thinking. But Trump revealed through his often Quixotic campaign that millions of Americans agreed with him that the real threat came from the country’s ruling elites of both parties who presided over national decline and economic inertia, failed to secure the country’s borders, got America mired in unceasing Mideast wars, and pursued trade policies viewed as harmful to the country’s middle class. He galvanized white working class voters and rural folks throughout the nation, even in traditionally Democratic states in the Midwest and Great Lakes region, such as Wisconsin, Iowa, Ohio and Pennsylvania. By 2:40 a.m. Eastern time, when Pennsylvania put Trump over the top in the Electoral College, the Republican candidate had flipped five major states that had voted for Barack Obama in both 2008 and 2012—Florida, Iowa, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. In addition, Michigan and New Hampshire, also Obama states in the two previous elections, teetered between the two candidates as votes were counted late into the night. Trump was particularly strong among whites without college degrees, expanding his margin of victory with this voter segment to nearly 40 percentage points from just 25 percentage points in 2004. Whites with college degrees remained with the GOP but by a much smaller margin than in previous years. Wealthy Americans shifted away from the Republican Party in significant numbers. All this suggested the possibility of a serious realignment in American politics, with more wealthy voters (educated suburbanites, Country Club types, urban dwellers) moving toward the Democrats and with working class Americans (once the bedrock of the Democrats’ old FDR coalition) shifting to the GOP. But the intensity of voter angst in this particular campaign year could be seen in some exit poll results. Responding to a question on what voters considered the most important issue, some 40 percent said they were animated primarily by a desire for change. Of those, 82 percent voted for Trump, compared to only 13 percent for Clinton. Two other question segments revealed a willingness on the part of many voters to overlook Trump’s personal shortcomings in the interest of getting the country on a new course. Among those who felt neither major candidate was qualified for the presidency, Trump garnered 69 percent. Among those who said neither had the temperament for the office, he collected 70 percent. In other words, when forced to choose between two unpalatable choices, a large majority considered Trump the least unpalatable.

My friend, we all enjoy hearing your opinions. What the gentleman actually wrote is: "There's also the problem of supplying Volvo "legacy" parts, as Volvo has corrupted Mack with their engines and more for over a decade now." Most folks agree there's a big difference between some people have a clean, constructive and intelligent conversation, .......and bashing. Please step back, take a deep breath and reread the posts. There's no Volvo bashing above, rather, just some thoughts related to a financially-challenged Volvo now selling off many assets. Mack could easily be next. If you are thrilled to death with your Mack-badged Volvo trucks, I think that's great. If you're happy, I'm happy. And if you're that pleased with Volvo engineering, i.e. the better choice as you put it, you can simply buy a Volvo the next time around. I don't care for Cummins myself, aside from the Cummins-Scania XPI common rail fuel injection. I don't care for Western Star's direction in the US market, but they sell a superb product in Australia and New Zealand. As many fleet managers will tell you, and our own Bullhusk (Ernie), the Detroit engines are arguably the best powerplants currently available in the North American market. I myself wouldn't touch a Volvo engine, one reason being the Delphi fuel injection and its related problems.

We'll never know what happened......................but something "did" happen. But it appears that when Comey announced the investigation of the emails on the Weiner computer 11 days before the election, Clinton lost her broad support from the aristocracy. Secret discussions were held.......negotiations took place. One obvious possibility is that knowing Hillary would have been plagued by investigations throughout her tenure made her election a non-option.

Trump's Road To Victory Jacob Heilbrunn, The National Interest / November 9, 2016 Trump’s accomplishment may be to reshape the Republican party into a populist one. Now that he has won the presidency, Donald Trump looks, to use one of his favorite phrases, like a political genius. For those of you who blanch at the notion, get real. He scoffed at the idea that he needed pollsters or a lot of advertising. He was patently bored by the notion of fundraising, and didn’t do much of it. He lashed into his detractors and political foes with relish, deploying a barrage of insults that would have made even Lenin, who contributed much to the lexicon of insults, proud. But most notably, Trump devised an electoral strategy based on the Rust Belt that propelled him to the presidency. It was Trump, and Trump alone, who set the course of his campaign, defied his advisers, destroyed both the House of Bush and Clinton and engineered his victory, which is invariably being labeled as “stunning.” Certainly it stunned the political establishment. During the campaign, it was his adversary Hillary Clinton who came across as a relic of the old order. Her campaign was the political equivalent of the Hindenburg disaster. It was always difficult for Clinton to reinvent herself. Her husband Bill, after all, was an original New Democrat—a centrist who broke with the left-wing of the party. Along with other members of the Democratic Leadership Council such as Al Gore and Joseph Lieberman, he took a tough stand on foreign policy and social issues. That heritage was also ingrained in Hillary, though she tried to assuage the concerns of the followers of Bernie Sanders by tacking to the left on free trade. But somewhere along the way New Democrats became Old Democrats. Her recipe of jobs retraining and liberal social values didn’t offer much of sustenance to the white working-class that had once formed the base of the Democratic party. Democrats who try to blame the election results exclusively on FBI Director James Comey or on WikiLeaks are making a big mistake. These may have contributed to Trump’s victory, but they hardly formed its substance. Something much more fundamental is going on. Writers such as Michael Lind warned several decades ago about the rise of an America “overclass” that was indifferent to the economic fortunes of the rest of the country. Both the Democratic and Republican parties connived at this development. Now comes the revenge of the repressed who Trump appealed to with his incendiary rhetoric. Trump’s accomplishment may be to reshape the Republican party into a populist one. The Republican retention of the Senate and House of Representatives means that, at least for two years, gridlock should be a thing of the past. The burden for Trump and the GOP will be enormous. The prospect of Congress actually legislating brings to mind Lady Markby’s remark in Oscar Wilde’s play An Ideal Husband: “Really, now that the House of Commons is trying to become useful, it does a great deal of harm.” Trump will be intent on repealing ObamaCare, but what will replace it? Disputes are certain to emerge about taxes and spending as well. To what extent will deficit hawks clash with supply-siders? Does Trump really want to spend double what Clinton proposed on infrastructure programs? How will he pay for a massive military buildup? How will Republicans like Paul Ryan deal with, or adapt to, Trump’s demands for renegotiating NAFTA? Will Trump really pursue a trade war with China, one that could trigger a recession, if not a global economic meltdown? When it comes to foreign policy, Trump also faces a litany of choices and difficulties. He has suggested that he might meet with Russian president Vladimir Putin before he takes office. He will have to assess American relations with NATO allies as well as the pivot to Asia that the Obama administration began to execute. Writing in the Washington Post, David Ignatius suggests that Trump “will bring an intense “realist” focus on U.S. national interests and a rejection of costly U.S. engagements abroad.” The key question he will have to answer is what actually constitutes realism. The next question, of course, is which advisers will help him define that. Not since Dwight Eisenhower has America had a president who never held prior political office—and in the military, Eisenhower was the politician par excellence. Above all, Trump will confront the inherent limitations of the presidency. He can’t simply issue ukases. Trump will collide with the uncomfortable truth Founding Fathers sought to keep the three branches of government in a kind of equipoise. Though it seems doubtful that Trump is familiar with it, Marx’s 18th of Brumaire contains more than a bit of wisdom: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” For now the GOP is Trump’s party. But if Trump really wants to show that he’s mastered the art of the deal, he will have to deal artfully with both his friends and foes. It's a tall order.

Two days ago, most of the mainstream media was still slamming Trump. Within the first six hours of Trump winning, the same mainstream media was being kind to him, hoping to get on his good side, with the White House Press Corps in mind. Now, 12 hours later, the mainstream media to predicting gloom. The sad thing is, many Americans are influenced one way or another by the mainstream media.

Allegedly, big business, the financial world and governments around the world were relatively confident that their girl would win, and will be shaken for a period of time by the uncertainty of Trump's win. Hedging their bets, I assume they held discrete discussions with him over the last 60 days. We'll have to see.......it could be interesting. If he holds to his promises, the next four years shouldn't be the least bit dull.

Trump had said multiple times that, if elected, "She [Hillary Clinton] has to go to jail". (Based on what we're told, I couldn't agree more) But today, Trump said in his victory speech, "We owe (Clinton) a very major debt of gratitude to her for her service to our country." If Ambassador Chris Stevens could speak down to us, I doubt he'd be so kind. It all implies that a backroom agreement was made within the last 30 days. My gut feeling is Trump has agreed not to have his attorney general appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Clinton, if she goes quietly.

Let's revisit this rumor again. "Comey let Clinton off the hook because he knows that Trump is going to win. Comey isn't charging Hillary, so that Obama can't pardon her."

Associated Press / November 9, 2016 Donald Trump was elected America's 45th president Tuesday, an astonishing victory for a celebrity businessman and political novice who capitalized on voters' economic anxieties, took advantage of racial tensions and overcame a string of sexual assault allegations on his way to the White House. His triumph over Hillary Clinton will end eight years of Democratic dominance of the White House and threatens to undo major achievements of President Barack Obama. Trump has pledged to quickly repeal Obama's landmark health care law, revoke the nuclear agreement with Iran and rewrite important trade deals with other countries, particularly Mexico and Canada. The Republican blasted through Democrats' longstanding firewall, carrying Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, states that hadn't voted for a GOP presidential candidate since the 1980s. He needed to win nearly all of the competitive battleground states, and he did just that, claiming Florida, Ohio, North Carolina and others. Global stock markets and U.S. stock futures plunged deeply, reflecting investor alarm over what a Trump presidency might mean for the economy and trade. A New York real estate developer who lives in a sparking Manhattan high-rise, Trump forged a striking connection with white, working class Americans who feel left behind in a changing economy and diversifying country. He cast immigration, both from Latin America and the Middle East, as the root of the problems plaguing many Americans and taped into fears of terrorism emanating at home and abroad. Trump will take office with Congress expected to be fully under Republican control. GOP Senate candidates fended off Democratic challengers in key states and appeared poised to maintain the majority. Republicans also maintained their grip on the House. Senate control means Trump will have great leeway in appointing Supreme Court justices, which could mean a major change to the right that would last for decades. Trump upended years of political convention on his way to the White House, leveling harshly personal insults on his rivals, deeming Mexican immigrants rapists and murderers, and vowing to temporarily suspend Muslim immigration to the U.S. He never released his tax returns, breaking with decades of campaign tradition, and eschewed the kind of robust data and field efforts that helped Obama win two terms in the White House, relying instead on his large, free-wheeling rallies to energize supporters. His campaign was frequently in chaos, and he cycled through three campaign managers this year. The mood at Clinton's party grew bleak as the night wore out, with some supporters leaving, others crying and hugging each other. Top campaign aides stopped returning calls and texts, as Clinton and her family hunkered down in a luxury hotel watching the returns. Trump will inherit an anxious nation, deeply divided by economic and educational opportunities, race and culture. Exit polls underscored the fractures: Women nationwide supported Clinton by a double-digit margin, while men were significantly more likely to back Trump. More than half of white voters backed the Republican, while nearly 9 in 10 blacks and two-thirds of Hispanics voted for the Democrat. Doug Ratliff, a 67-year-old businessman from Richlands, Virginia, said Trump's election would be one of the happiest days of his life. "This county has had no hope," said Ratliff, who owns strip malls in the area badly beaten by the collapse of the coal industry. "You have no idea what it would mean for the people if Trump won. They'll have hope again. Things will change. I know he's not going to be perfect. But he's got a heart. And he gives people hope." Trump has pledged to usher in a series of sweeping changes to U.S. domestic and foreign policy: repealing Obama's signature health care law, though he has been vague on what he could replace it with; building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border; and suspending immigration from country's with terrorism ties. He's also praised Russian President Vladimir Putin and spoken of building a better relationship with Moscow, worrying some in his own party who fear he'll go easy on Putin's provocations. The Republican Party's tortured relationship with its nominee was evident right up to the end. Former President George W. Bush and wife Laura Bush declined to back Trump, instead selecting "none of the above" when they voted for president. Democrats, as well as some Republicans, expected Trump's unconventional candidacy would damage down-ballot races and even flip some reliably red states in the presidential race. But Trump held on to Republican territory, including in Georgia and Utah, where Clinton's campaign confidently invested resources. Clinton asked voters to keep the White House in her party's hands for a third straight term. She cast herself as heir to President Barack Obama's legacy and pledged to make good on his unfinished agenda, including passing immigration legislation, tightening restrictions on guns and tweaking his signature health care law. But she struggled throughout the race with persistent questions about her honesty and trustworthiness. Those troubles flared anew late in the race, when FBI Director James Comey announced a review of new emails from her tenure at the State Department. On Sunday, just two days before Election Day, Comey said there was nothing in the material to warrant criminal charges against Clinton.

Trump is now president elect.

Department of Defense Fiscal Year 2017 President’s Budget Submission February 2016 Department of the Army Truck, Dump, 20 ton The M917A3 22.5 ton Heavy Dump Truck (HDT) is a commercially based system used to load, transport, and dump payloads of sand and gravel aggregates, crushed rock, hot paving mixes, earth, clay, rubble, and large boulders at engineering and construction sites under worldwide climatic conditions in a military environment. The HDT integrated armor requirement is compliant with the Tactical Wheeled Vehicle Long Term Armor Strategy (LTAS) Ballistic Specifications, v3.7, dated 19 Jan 06. The HDT is required to replace the F5070, M917 and M917A1 HDTs with the oldest fielded variants at 50 years of age. Heavy Dump Truck (HDT) Low Rate Initial Production (LRIP) build is to begin 3QFY18 followed by Product Verification Testing (PVT) in FY19. Concurrent armor development is to begin 2QFY18. Armored solution testing will run 2QFY20 through 2QFY21 and production will begin 1QFY22. Note: The Heavy Tactical Vehicle (HTV) Protection Kit program provides Armor Survivability Suite protection. HTV Protection Kits include B-Kits (with underbody protection), Fire Suppression, Fuel Tank Fire Suppression (FTFS) Blanket , Fuel Tank Self Sealant (FTSS), and Tank Armor Module (TAM) to enhance survivability. The Armor Survivability Suite components are mounted to an A-Kit Heavy Tactical Vehicle; which includes Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Truck (HEMTT), Heavy Equipment Transporter System (HET), Palletized Load System (PLS), Heavy Dump Truck (HDT), and Line Haul configurations to address numerous threats that the DoD has identified. The Armor Survivability Suite provides occupant protection through enhanced tactical vehicle ballistic protection.

Scania Group Press Release / November 8, 2016 .

Renault Trucks Press Release / November 8, 2016 .

MAN Truck & Bus Press Release / November 8, 2016 .

Whether you like or hate Volvo and scrapple, I'll still give you a hug. Now, if you don't like Yuengling Black & Tan, perogies and Heavenly Hash ice cream, I might not.

A gentleman opened a thread to discuss the topic "Should VW buy Mack?" You posted that he and the fellow BMT members who entered into an intelligent discussion with him were "b*tching about Volvo". Now, why would you do that? If the thread doesn't interest you, or annoys you, simply exercise your freedom to skip the thread and move on. Why bash these people, your fellow BMT members? Prior to your post, had any one of these people sent you a PM ridiculing you? I always strive to respect your thoughts. Like all BMT members, you have in the past brought great points into many a discussion. However, today, I struggle to understand why you would attack your fellow BMT members. Getting along with people begins with mutual respect and consideration. I myself am FAR from perfect, but I always strive to express my thoughts on BMT in a respectable and considerate manner.

This Election Changes Nothing—At Least for the Economy The National Interest / November 8, 2016 Few remedies for the economy have a high probability of making it through a divided government. The next president will have less effect on the U.S. economy than the bevy of powerful, persistent forces that are slowing the nation’s growth. Demographics will be the largest drag, but high global debt loads, slowing innovation, China’s secular slowing and other central banks’ actions are all headwinds. Slow growth makes monetary policy more difficult to execute, leaving policymakers with few tools to spur growth. While monetary policy is very effective in normal environments, it cannot address aging populations or slowing productivity. Fiscal spending is chief among the possible remedies, but given the current debt load, fiscal spending does not come without consequences. Unlike the Federal Reserve’s quantitative-easing strategy, the spending is not costless; at some point, it must be paid back. (While QE may “cost” consumers in the future through inflation, this has yet to become the reality.) Few remedies for the economy have a high probability of making it through a divided government. To a degree, this should limit the reach and extent of further damage to the economy. But proper governance would be more effective in counteracting the pressures the U.S. economy will feel in the coming years than simply additional monetary policy pressures. Simply stated, it does not matter who sits in the Oval Office. Spurring growth will be a treacherous undertaking, especially as the Fed tightens policy. Recently the global growth story has revolved around China’s rapid growth and voracious appetite for commodities. China contributes nearly a third of the comparable (by purchasing power parity) growth to the global economy. That is a stunning figure. More than simply driving its own economy, China’s incredible emergence has lifted the commodity-producing nations of the world, many of which were smaller, emerging nations that required better infrastructure in the form of ports, bridges, roads and electrical grids in order to meet the voracious new demand. It was an incredibly fortuitous positive feedback loop. When China stopped buying, much of the emerging world stopped growing. Granted, China is attempting to soften the blow. Its “One Belt, One Road” initiative to build out trading lanes in Asia and elsewhere could provide an eventual boost to those economies affected most by China’s slowdown. But this attempt to assuage the impact will take years to prove effective, if it does at all. And in its wake, China leaves the global economy searching for its next great growth story. The problem? There may not be one on the horizon. What does this mean for the Fed? A slower-growing China and emerging markets makes it more difficult to spur growth at home. And because they are not growing as quickly, there is far less pressure on prices—especially commodities. Lower growth and lower inflation pressures are not conducive to raising rates. The Fed knows it will be fighting this battle for years to come. If the United States were a “closed” economy, there is a good chance interest rates would be higher. While this is fine as a thought experiment, it is ineffective for policy design or debate given the hyper-globalized reality that is the new normal. The United States is an ultra-open economy with the dominant currency in trade and finance. This means that even small differentials in monetary policy between itself and other countries will have a significant spillover effect. Policy makers at the Fed must not only deal with the economic realities facing the United States, but with the extraordinary policies emanating from other central banks. The principal offenders are the Bank of Japan, the European Central Bank and the People’s Bank of China; there is no end to it in sight. The Bank of Japan has announced it will maintain its ten-year yield at 0 percent for the near future, the European Central Bank is likely to extend its quantitative easing, and the People’s Bank of China is slowly and steadily depreciating the Chinese yuan. In their own ways, each of the other major central banks is making it more difficult for the Fed to raise interest rates. This is because each of the other major central banks is making the dollar stronger. A stronger dollar causes the U.S. economy to slow and inflation pressures to decline. The essence of the problem is that the United States loses growth and inflation, not because of something endemic to the U.S. economy, but because the U.S. dollar strengthens—a feedback loop that is difficult to break. While it hurts the United States to be tightening during extreme easing elsewhere, it benefits others. Without the Fed’s relative policy tightness, European Central Bank president Mario Draghi’s stimulus program would not be as successful and neither would the stimulus currently underway in Japan. China, by allowing its currency to weaken, regains some competitiveness in exporting goods. This is part of the Fed’s dilemma. The U.S. economy has proven to be far more resilient than other developed countries. The United States avoided a multi-dip recession following the Great Recession, something Europe cannot claim to have done, and a hypervigilant Fed should receive some credit. This resilience should be a blessing, but, in many ways, a stronger dollar and the resulting lack of monetary policy leeway diminish many of the advantages. The problem is that the Fed has not been particularly accurate in predicting how quickly it will raise rates. When the Fed forecasts a specific number of hikes, financial markets (at least initially) anticipate the moves. This means that even before the Fed announces a rate hike, the market has pushed interest rates and the U.S. dollar higher. It is this premature tightening that has befuddled and aggravated the Fed. It causes U.S. growth to slow, and forces the Fed to back down from stated plans. It damages credibility and threatens to dictate policy. The Fed’s reluctance to admit how much the first two factors (China’s slowdown and the easing of other central banks) affect policy is largely responsible for this final piece, and may be the most important since the Fed will rely far more on confidence and credibility to conduct monetary policy in the future. Regardless of who takes the White House, these problems are not going away. Monetary policy will struggle because global growth has disappeared, because central banks are reacting to it and because the Fed misunderstood the difficulties of executing policy in this environment—not, as some would argue, because of partisan politics.

How China Has Created Its Own TPP The National Interest / November 8, 2016 While the United States was talking, China was acting. We’ve heard repeated attacks during the presidential campaign against the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the commercial treaty signed by the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and seven additional countries from Asia and Latin America. Much of the opposition—and even the occasional support—has focused on China. Supporters of the proposed treaty see it less as an economic accord and more as a strategic accord, necessary to contain China. Opponents see it as a threat, another bad trade deal which, after ratification by the U.S. Senate, might embolden signatories to let China in through “the back door,” resulting in new calamities for American workers. The truth is: Both views are wrong—and for the same reason. TPP will do little, if anything, to slow the growth of China’s economic and political power. And it will have little effect on American workers. The reason: because TPP is irrelevant to China. They don’t need to be involved. As Kim Iskyan, founder of Singapore’s Truewealth Publishing pointed out in a revealing analysis, China wasn’t sitting on its hands during the eight-year period in which TPP was being negotiated (2006-2014.) It was enhancing its economic ties to the Asia-Pacific region and building a strong trading network of its own. Today, while U.S. politicians are busy running from and against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, China already has free-trade agreements (FTAs) with nine of the twelve TPP signatories. While the United States was talking, China was acting, completing agreements with Australia and Chile in 2006, New Zealand and Singapore in 2008, Peru in 2009, and the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN)—which includes TPP members Brunei, Malaysia and Vietnam—in 2010. Chinese investment in the region also has skyrocketed, increasing more than 350 percent among the ASEAN nations alone from 2006 to 2014. While U.S. politicians are debating whether TPP is the best way to contain Beijing or a Trojan horse of Chinese economic imperialism (even though China isn’t even part of the treaty), the Chinese have created their own TPP and they’re busy expanding it. The ties go well beyond trade and investment. China also is building new links to their trading partners—physical links, including airports, roads and ports—providing everything from the concrete, steel and labor to the financing to pay for them. As Harold L. Sirkin, a senior partner at the Boston Consulting Group, wrote in Forbes, China’s “Belt and Road” initiative—the name of the ambitious $1 trillion program—will strengthen China's ties to other nations, while the United States is in apparent retreat. Sirkin concludes: “The United States can do everything that is necessary to successfully compete in tomorrow’s world or we can go into decline. If we become a trade prima donna,” he warns, “we open the door to the Chinese, who are ready, willing and able to fill any void we create.” Don’t look, but it may already be happening. According to the World Bank global trade accounts for some 58 percent of world GDP. In North America, the equivalent figure is 31 percent of GDP. Who’s to blame? Not Canada (where trade accounts for 65 percent of GDP) or Mexico (73 percent); the problem is the United States, where trade accounts for just 28 percent of GDP. The U.S. presidential campaign features politicians on both sides whose trade policies—if that’s what they can be called—are mired in misinformation and ideological fabrications. That’s the real threat to American workers. If there’s any solace to be taken, it’s the fact that the United States already has twelve free trade agreements with Latin America that will be very difficult to undo if the next president feels the urge or the pressure to “renegotiate” them. One wonders how long it would take a country like China to become the region’s dominant economic power in this sort of environment. More than ten percent of Latin America’s exports already go to China and almost eighteen percent of its imports originate in that country. That a communist dictatorship should be giving the land of Thomas Jefferson lessons on free trade is one of the paradoxes of these confusing times.