Reason #235,278,384 to Secede From the Union

Well, it looks like we won't invade Greenland after all.  Trump announced that a framework for a deal the benefits the United States was established with NATO that will make a war with Denmark over Greenland unnecessary,  I guess that means that, for now at least, I can plan my next trip to Europe after all.  But with every move Trump makes, it is becoming more likely that I will have to do what I should have done when I was in France and Germany last year - stay in Europe and send for my cats.

Trump didn't really want Greenland.  He just wanted to upset the apple cart.  As Rick Wilson of the Lincoln Project said, the mere power play Trump perpetrated against Denmark only ruptured NATO, which was what Trump wanted.  It was never about Greenland.  Just as likely Trump doesn't want to annex Canada.  He wants to disrupt the relationship between Canada and the United States and sever the ties between the two nations.  He doesn't want peace, although he campaigned for the Presidency against forever wars in other parts of the world.   He wants more power over the Western Hemisphere, as his attack on Venezuela proved.  He wants hegemony over as much of the globe as he can acquire.  Quite, bluntly, he wants to do what Madonna (another Madge-Trump comparison) told Dick Clark on "American Bandstand" what she wanted to do - "Umm, I want to rule the world."

At Davos this week, other nations made it clear that they were not pleased with Trump.  Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney made that much clear when he said that his nation would continue to preserve and protect its values and its commitment to human freedom and dignity in the face of a more belligerent American foreign policy, meaning that Canada and other second-tier powers had to stand up to superpowers like the United States.  Trump swatted away Carney's comments, insisting that Canada owes its existence to the United States (actually, Canada owes its existence to the British Commonwealth, but that's another story).  But Trump's direction is clear.  The trade wars he has started against Europe and Canada with his tariffs, coupled with his decisions to use hard power to enforce American priorities in not just Latin America and the Middle East but in other Western nations, make Trump and the United States a danger to the planet.  Which is precisely why Prime Minister Carney entered a new trade deal with China that freezes out the U.S.  And seventy-seven million people in the U.S. voted for all this in 2024.

Oh yeah, I ought to tell you about Trump's interview with Fox News' Maria Bartiromo, who, according to breaking news, still can't talk.  He told her that the United States has always carried the weight of defense in NATO and not only said that the U.S. doesn't need the military backing of its allies but added that their participation in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  That came as a shock to British, German, French, Lithuanian, and yes, Danish soldiers who lost their lives coming to the aid of Americans after 9/11.  (Denmark lost more soldiers in Afghanistan than any other nation per capita.)  Is Trump aware that the United States is responsible for only 39 percent of NATO's defenses?  Is he aware that, even though the U.S. spends more on defense than it should, 39 percent is still less than half of NATO defenses?  I'm sure he is, because he's asked for a 50 percent increase in the already-bloated military budget, which would compensate for the loss of NATO support if the alliance becomes only a Canadian-European pact but would also starve America's already-emaciated social programs.

No sane politician at the state level, at least no sane Democratic politician at the state level, should want to be part of such a nation.  As for what the United States used to be, well, I'd like to recall what Kamala Harris said a year and a half ago: "We're not going back."  (Ironic, no?)

Oh yeah, don't forget Harris' post-election assurance that turned out to be a lie: "It's gonna be okay."

For my state and for several states in the Northeast, the Great Lakes region, and the Pacific Coast to remain in the Union is suicide.  It's time to get out.  And hopefully, a wave of secession can break up the U.S. into separate countries so that no one post-U.S. nation can ever achieve the hegemony that the U.S. has long since had.   I am for the dissolution of the Union.  I am a secessionist.

Conqueror Trump

I knew Trump had a lot in common with Hitler, such wanting all power over the people, rewarding his allies, punishing adversaries, and palling around with other fascist leaders, one thing I didn't think he had in common with Hitler was a desire to acquire more territory.

Then he started making threats against Panama.

Trump threatened to take over the Panama Canal - which the United States ceded to Panama when its lease ended because of Panama's closer ties with China - which Trump allowed to happen the last time he was President. 

And not only is he once again trying to annex Greenland from Denmark - likely to be able to build condos there once climate change melts enough of it.

Trump is also referring to Canada as the fifty-first state, suggesting that he wants to annex Canada so as to connect Alaska with the rest of the U.S.  

Meanwhile, he's indicated that he wants to emulate President James K. Polk and start another war with Mexico . . . 

. . . probably to acquire Acapulco.

😦

The Week In Crazy

So much insanity has happened this week that I'm almost ready to give up blogging.

First, there was Trump's temper tantrum over trade with China, a legitimate issue, considering our trade deficit with the world's most populous country, that he has de-legitimatized with tariff threats and unilateral bullying of China's president. Trump said  he was "the chosen one" - at the same time that he also accused Jews of selfishness and disloyalty for voting Democratic and thus betraying Israel (therefore expressing solidarity with and making anti-Semitic tropes against Jews simultaneously).  Trump may have been chosen by 304 electors, but 54 percent of the American popular electorate chose someone else.

And then there's his sudden support for manifest destiny.  I don't know how this whole business started (to borrow an opening lyric from a late-seventies pop song), but someone suggested that Donald Trump might want to buy Greenland.  I used to joke, back in the late eighties when Trump was a real estate developer and climate change was called the greenhouse effect and not taken very seriously by anyone whose name wasn't Albert Gore, that if the planet warmed up, Trump would buy property up there to build condos.  Now he wants to buy the whole damn island!

Denmark, which owns Greenland, politely let Trump know that the island is not for sale, and Trump canceled a state visit to Copenhagen because Denmark's female prime minister was "nasty" to him.  There may be strategic reasons to own the world's largest island - Secretary of State William Seward tried to buy it when he bought Alaska from Russia in 1867, and President Harry Truman considered the idea in 1946 - and there are also commercial reasons to but it, which I'll explain in the next paragraph. But Trump made a hissy fit when he was old that Greenland was not for sale, not unlike in the book "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," when Veruca Salt refused to take no for an answer when she wanted to buy one of Willy Wonka's trained nut-shelling squirrels.  ("I want the world . . .")

Despite being far up in the Arctic, Greenland is a viable island because of its vast mineral resources, which Americans are eager to get in on, and the Danes would be happy if we do, because they make money off mineral exploration, which is already being undertaken there by . . . China.  But then, mineral exploration in Greenland is only made possible by climate change, which is melting glaciers up north as well as exacerbating rain-forest fires in the Brazilian jungle, and rain forests there, which help blunt the effects climate change, have been cleared for farmland at an amazing clip already.  French President Emanuel Macron hopes to address the Brazilian wildfires at the Group of Seven economic summit in the French seaside resort town of Biarritz, except that Trump won't want to talk about it because he wants to keep Mr. Murray's coal trains running back home. 

At least one billionaire industrialist - not the coal magnate Bob Murray - won't live to see the worst effects of the climate change he's famous for denying.  It seems that David Koch died.

And on the day that Trump, whose protectionism the Kochs despised, made unflattering remarks about China and his own Federal Reserve director, sending the stock market down over six hundred points and threatening his own re-election hopes - so long as Marianne Williamson isn't the Democratic nominee.

Crazy.