United States 2016

Yearbook 2016

USA. Of the twelve Republican candidates ahead of this fall’s presidential election, which was included when the primary election began in February, seven withdrew from the first month already. Quite immediately, Donald Trump emerged as the leading candidate, even though he was contentious even within the party. In May, it was clear that Trump won the nomination.

In the Democratic primary elections, Bernie Sanders became a more difficult contender for the favorite-tipped Hillary Clinton than many expected. According to countryaah, the current population of United States is 331,002,662. The 74-year-old professional politician, above all, attracted young voters. It was only when all the primary elections were held in June that he put down his campaign and expressed his support for Clinton in the election.

United States Population 2016

Ahead of the July party convention, Republicans appointed Indiana Governor Mike Pence as vice presidential candidate, while Democrats appointed Virginia Senator Tim Kaine. During the fall, most polls pointed to Clinton’s victory in the Nov. 8 election, despite the disclosure that she, as Secretary of State, used a private mail server, in violation of the rules, as well as allegations of too close ties with the financial elite on Wall Street.

At the same time, several leading Republicans sharply distanced themselves from Trump, who appeared to be incalculable, ignorant and rude, and who made racist, sexist and false statements. Among a number of controversies were verbal attacks on a Muslim man whose son fell into the U.S. Army, a disastrous death threat to Clinton, hint that the United States would not live up to its commitments within NATO, and allegations that Obama and Clinton founded the terrorist state Islamic State (IS).

In the Nov. 9 election, surprisingly, Trump won with 306 electoral votes against Clinton for 232. However, she received just over 2.5 million more votes. In the contemporary congressional elections, Republicans retained their majority even though they backed slightly in both chambers.

Trump continued to cheer for his supporters and disgust among detractors, not least through his nominations for top posts where many belonged to the financial elite or were generals but lacked political experience.

After the election, intelligence agencies reported that the Russian Federation was actively working for a victory for Trump, including through hacker attacks against the Democrats. Trump dismissed the information, but President Obama expelled 35 Russian diplomats just before New Year and imposed some sanctions in protest of the data breach.

The Supreme Court was a judge short almost all year. When Judge Antonin Scalia died suddenly in February, the possibility was opened that the balance of power in the court would tip over from the favor of the Conservatives to the Liberals. But the Republican-dominated Senate refused to even discuss the nominee presented by President Barack Obama. As a result, Scalia’s place remained vacant throughout the year and the court could not decide questions where there was an even weight between the eight judges.

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When Obama went to Cuba in March, it was the first time since 1928 that an American president visited the country. In May, he visited Hiroshima in Japan, becoming the first US president at the site of the first nuclear bomb 71 years earlier.

In June, 49 people were killed when a man opened fire at a gay club in Orlando, Florida in what was described as the worst mass shooting in US history. The perpetrator who was shot dead himself had sworn allegiance to the terrorism IS just before the act.

The debate over disproportionate police violence against African Americans gained new fuel after two almost simultaneous incidents in July where one man was shot dead in Louisiana and one in Minnesota. Police officers’ vulnerable position came into focus when a black war veteran the day after the Minnesota shooting killed five police officers in Texas, and just over a week after that, a black Navy veteran shot dead three police officers in Louisiana.

A disputed law was passed which meant that relatives of victims of the September 11 attacks in 2001 were given the opportunity to sue Saudi Arabia, from where 15 of the 19 aircraft came. Obama tried to stop the law, which he claimed created a dangerous precedent, but he was voted down by Congress. It was Obama’s twelfth veto and the first to be voted down.

Resistance to the construction of an oil pipeline in North Dakota grew into the largest protest action among Indigenous people in the United States in modern times. Residents of the Sioux Reserve Standing Rock set up a protest camp in April and eventually joined other indigenous people as well as environmental and activist groups. The protesters claimed that the management threatened a water source and invaded places sacred to the Sioux people. In September, the protests turned into violent clashes with police using tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannons. In December, a federal government stopped building. Many cheered while others thought the stop was temporary.

1993-2001 Democrats back in power

The crisis was the main reason why an unprecedented Arkansas governor defeated Bush in November 1992. Bill Clinton won the presidential election by promising voters jobs, economic progress, reducing the tax burden for low-income groups and implementing health care reform. However, the reform was voted down in Congress in 1994.

With the crisis, xenophobia in the United States also increased. In 1994, in a referendum, California decided that children of illegal immigrants should not be entitled to education in the future, and in 1995-97 several states decided to abolish minority groups’ right to public employment and access to public contracts – the so-called “Affirmative Action” programs.

During the same period, the country’s prison service expanded dramatically. The crisis had increased the number of offenses, prisons were overcrowded and steps were now being taken to build new prisons and expand existing ones. About half of all young African-American men were either in jail, or had been inside. The punishments had severe social and ethnic impact. The African and Latin American population was clearly over-represented. A total of 1.7 million North Americans are currently in prison – and that number is on the rise.

At the same time, the number of prisoners on prison staff deaths increased. After decades of pause in the execution of death sentences, the United States had once again begun to execute its own citizens in 1976. In the late 1990’s, almost 3,000 prisoners were sitting on the death row of the prisons awaiting the final verdict of the authorities. The most prominent of these was Mumia Abu Jamal. An African-American journalist who, with his reports, had been a thorn in the eyes of the authorities in Philadelphia and who had been charged and sentenced to death for the murder of a police officer. Despite widespread international protests and a campaign by Amnesty International against the death sentences of the United States, executions continued, reaching 80 executions in 1997, a preliminary highlight.

The economy improved and unemployment fell during Clinton’s first presidential term (1993-97), but not without significant social costs. Working hours increased and wages fell drastically among the low-paid. The United States developed a new concept: “Working poor”, referring to the phenomenon that even through work, the poorest part of the population could no longer keep the poverty rate low. At the same time, the Clinton administration drastically reduced the state’s social assistance programs. It was one of the contributing reasons why the Democrats lost the majority in Congress for the first time in 40 years in the 1994 midterm elections. At the same time, the extreme right wing increased its organization. One example of this was the terrorist bombing in 1995 against a federal building in Oklahoma that cost over 200 lives.

During a period marked by rising social turbulence internally in the United States, Clinton sought to strengthen his position through foreign policy initiatives. After allowing the civil war to rage in former Yugoslavia for four years and causing the EU’s foreign policy project to suffer shipwreck, in the fall of 1995, the United States intervened and forced the Dayton Agreement in December to force the warring parties to make peace. In October 96, negotiations were held between Palestine and Israel in Washington with the Clinton administration as the mediator, and the following month Clinton was re-elected for a second presidential term.

In January 1998, the so-called Monica Lewinsky scandal broke out, which, as protagonists, had the president, a student intern at the White House and a cigar. The sex scandal was supposed to be the main weapon on the part of Republicans to bolster their majority in Congress at the November 98 midterm elections and pave the way for a Republican president in 2001, but instead, Republicans suffered a staggering defeat. They took revenge by suing Clinton for a state court, and Clinton at the last minute, with a swift attack on Iraq, tried to stave off this development. The country’s political establishment was in deep crisis and the economy was in crisis following the crisis’s development first in Southeast Asia and then in Russia and Brazil.

However, the Supreme Court which was set in February 1999 was unable to convict the president. The charge of perjury fell by 55 to 45 votes, and the charge of obstruction of justice fell by 50 to 50 votes. To cast the president, a 2/3 majority in the Senate was required.

The conflict with Cuba caught fire again in November 1999 due to boy Elián González, the only survivor of a shipwreck. His mother, along with others, had tried to reach Miami for asylum. According to thereligionfaqs, the North American judiciary and ultimately the Justice Department decided the boy should be sent back to his father in Cuba, but were thwarted by exile Cubans in Miami and Republicans led by Dan Burton, who had helped write the Helms-Burton law that expanded the blockade against Cuba. Burton proposed in Congress that the boy be granted North American citizenship – in order to prevent his return to his father.

In 2000, economic growth continued – the longest last in US history. In 1996, a new social welfare system had been introduced, unemployment was falling, wages were rising, and at the same time the number of families dependent on social assistance was falling. Yet, economic growth did not help to create greater equality or reduce social divisions. The gap between rich and poor was growing, and middle-income groups were shrinking.

The presidential election in the United States on November 7, 2000 and the subsequent quarrels over the election decision became one of the most tumultuous in the country’s history. Vice President, Democrat Al Gore got the most votes, approx. ½ million more than the counterpart, Republican George W. Bush, who was governor of Texas and son of former President George Bush. But because of the election system in the United States, the winner of a state gets all the voting votes in that state. The result in one state could therefore be decisive, and in Florida there was a dead run between the two candidates. Out of 6 million votes, there were only a few hundred differences. The state’s 25 electoral votes would be crucial to the outcome of the presidential election.

While Democrats sought to get the vote in Florida, Republicans sought to halt the vote because Bush won the election on the first count. The election evolved into a legal and political farce, and in the end, the United States Supreme Court – which has a Republican majority – decided that the recount should be stopped. Bush thus became the winner of the election.