Bahama Pundit

Why Trump Won and What it Could Mean for the Bahamas

by Larry Smith

One thing’s for certain - there has been no shortage of analysis from every quarter on why Donald Trump won the US presidential election. 

For Breitbart News - the provocateur website run by Trump’s right-wing strategist Steve Bannon - it was a foregone conclusion. 

Their candidate (whom they refer to as ’Daddy’) promised to disrupt establishment politics and upend the sclerotic global system that America and its allies have built up over the past 70 years.

“We’re going to build an entirely new political movement,” Bannon said in a recent interview. "The conservatives are going to go crazy. I’m the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan…It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution  - conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement.”

Trump’s anti-globalist headline policies during the campaign focused on a border wall, radical immigration and trade restrictions, reneging on international treaties, and reversing whatever progress has been made on climate and environmental issues.

But before we get into that, let’s look at the numbers. At the time of writing, Hillary Clinton led Trump by well over a million votes - 48 to 47 per cent - but Trump won in the electoral college. 

Chinese Fishing Proposal—What it Means For the Bahamas

by Larry Smith

A firestorm erupted last week over leaked reports that the Christie administration was in talks to hand over farming and fishing rights to the Chinese.

Despite the fact that a detailed official report was circulating, and the fact that a cabinet minister had authorised the talks, government spin doctors went into an immediate frenzy.

Alfred Gray - the minister at the centre of the storm - first claimed the reports were “utterly false” and then dismissed them as political gamesmanship.

Other spokesmen castigated critics for being anti-Chinese and pointed out that it was former Prime Minister Hubert Ingraham who had initiated relations with the Peoples Republic in the 1990s.

It is also true that China signed a Memorandum of Understanding on agricultural cooperation with Gray’s predecessor under the last Ingraham administration - Larry Cartwright.

A team of Chinese experts toured Abaco back then, and government politicians promoted investments in food production and processing on 5,000 acres of Crown land. There was also talk of mariculture projects - but nothing came to pass

Nevertheless, in 2013 the Chinese ambassador noted that his nation was “very keen” on investing in The Bahamas, especially in the areas of renewable energy, agricultural production and fisheries. 

Probably the biggest difference between the Ingraham initiative and the current proposal is that, today, Bahamians know the government is politically desperate to restart the Chinese-owned and -controlled Baha Mar project. 

And since this government conducts most of the people’s business in secret, there is no way to know what quid is being offered for which quo. We have to assume that an exchange is taking place, as the Chinese are not here for charitable purposes.