Vote Rocks Malaysian Government

Malaysia is "one of the world's most economically advanced Muslim-majority nations and America's 10th-largest trade partner." 10th largest; that's amazing. I had no idea it was such a significant economic force. Its total population is 26 million people.

Canada, Japan, China, Mexico, Brazil, France, England, Germany make the eight guesses I'd make for US's largest trading partners. So that leaves two others (assuming I'm right; I should check that to make sure. A good source to begin that research would be the US Department of Commerce).

A quick check in commerce.gov yields this table:

Top Ten Countries with which the U.S. Trades - for month of September 2005

The values given are for Imports and Exports added together. These Countries represent 66.75% of U.S. Imports, and 65.49% of U.S. Exports in goods.

                                 Year To Date
                  Total in         Total in
                  Billions         Billions
Country Name        of U.S. $        of U.S. $

Canada                  44.13           365.84
China                   26.51           205.96
Mexico                  24.89           212.59
Japan                   15.30           143.18
Germany                  9.28            87.37
United Kingdom           7.36            65.88
Korea, South             5.51            52.93
France                   4.57            41.47
Taiwan                   4.52            42.56
Malaysia                 3.95            32.07

So I had it mostly right (Canada, Japan, China, Mexico, Brazil, France, England, Germany). Not Brazil but Taiwan, and forgot South Korea. And Malaysia comes in at number 10. Interestingly, two thirds of the US's trade is with ten countries.

The Commerce Dept. is a mine of data. Another table available breaks down country by country the trade between such countries and the US. Interesting reading.

At any rate, what also caught my attention was this: "Until this weekend's election, the National Front held more than 90% of federal Parliament seats and ran 12 of 13 state administrations. But the spread of uncensored new media, such as the Internet and cellphone text messaging, helped opposition parties break the government's stranglehold on information flow, harnessing public anger over mounting inflation, widespread corruption and inept governance. Combined with rising resentment by ethnic Chinese and Indian minorities over affirmative-action policies designed to benefit the country's Muslim ethnic Malay majority, this anger coalesced into a perfect storm of protest against Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi's government." [emphasis added]

Again, as the case with Cuba is another recent post (Cuba and Judaism), the free flow of information made a political impact.