How to Make "That" Make Sense

Yesterday Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said this, on the occasion of Trump’s tariffs against Canadian goods:  “So today,the United States launched a trade war against Canada, their closest partner and ally, their closest friend. At the same time, they’re talking about working positively with Russia, appeasing Vladimir Putin, a lying, murderous dictator. Make that make sense.”

OK, let’s do that:  perhaps it does make sense if you consider that Donald Trump is a Russian asset, a Manchurian Candidate who returned from a business trip to Russia in the late 1980’s to proclaim in full page ads in major U.S. newspapers that the U.S. defence of Europe and Japan was subsidizing these countries and a waste of taxpayer’s money(which shows that he hasn’t changed his tune on that subject since then);  who ran a Russian money laundromat selling overpriced New York real estate to the Russian mafia;  who twenty years later began a winning Presidential campaign by borrowing the Russian propaganda technique of fire hosing multiple lies, obtaining additional help from the Russian “Internet Research Agency”, and publicly asking for Putin’s help to dump private emails from the democratic party onto the internet, which Putin, in fact, did the next day.

So you may be asking, if Trump is the Manchurian candidate, why didn’t he do more to benefit Russia in his first administration?  Well, the answer may be that, not having any previous political experience, he didn’t know how to, and his administration, which was largely made up of responsible people, constrained him from doing so.

But this time, both his words and actions actually do respect Russian priorities.  Putin has invaded Ukraine and wants to take it over and do away with  democratically elected leader Vladimir Zelensky;  and in the last week Trump has tried to make a unilateral deal with Russia, shutting out Zelensky, and giving Putin everything, without asking for any concessions in return.  He’s insulted Zelensky and the European Union, and betrayed his North American trading partners, while basically telegraphing that he won’t bother defending Europe  if Putin decides to invade another European country - a clear violation of the Nato agreement. And then he suspended intelligence surveillance of Russia, started the process of cancelling sanctions against Russian Oligarchs, and suspended military aid for Ukraine.  So last Friday, a Kremlin spokesman said  that Trump’s “rapidly changing all foreign policy configurations…largely aligns with our vision.”

As the Kremlin has pointed out, Trump has acted quickly to fulfill their wishes.  It took only one week for President Trump to deliver the breakup of Nato, the emasculation of American intelligence, the crippling of Ukraine’s defence and the welcoming of Russian Oligarchs to America’s shores - almost everything that Russia has wanted - handed to them on a silver platter. There - does that make enough sense now?

 

The Manchurian Candidate

   Note: This synopsis is about a remake of the 1962 movie starring Frank Sinatra, but the ridiculous and convoluted details of my story does not duplicate any of the ridiculous and convoluted plot details of the original.

A gaudy debt ridden American businessman with a love for bling and beautiful women hosts a beauty Pageant in Moscow, and is befriended by Russian agents. He is encouraged by them to pursue a political career back in the United States.  With the Russians help he is able to stave off bankruptcy by laundering Russian mafia money into purchases of New York real estate. One of the first things he does upon returning from Russia is to purchase a full page add in major U.S. Newspapers criticizing U.S. foreign policy, essentially calling for the end of U.S. military support for its allies, notably Saudi Arabia and Japan, as well as unspecified others, arguing it is a waste of taxpayer’s money to subsidize the defence of these foreign nations. He considers running for President at this time, but doesn’t follow through. Ten years later he becomes famous by starring in a reality show where he plays a savvy  business tycoon who has a flair for firing people. Ten years after that he re-enters politics by publicizing racist tropes about the first Black President, Barack Obama.  Then, adopting Russian propaganda techniques to spread a firehose of lies and conspiracy theories, he runs for President, and with the help of Russian hacking of his opponents emails, and Russian bots and fake social media accounts, he narrowly wins the election.   Once in power, he is actually hemmed in by the career politicians in his cabinet, who carefully prevent him from making some, but not all, of the bad decisions he intends to make. He is impeached twice, but there is not a sufficient majority to have him banned from running for office again. A year later he loses the next election, but claims he actually won it and foments an insurrection that fails.  Biding his time, he remains in contact with the Russian President Vladimir Putin, and congratulates him on the occasion of his 2022 military invasion of Ukraine, a sovereign nation. After dealing with multiple lawsuits for tax fraud, election fraud, stealing government documents, fomenting a violent insurrection, and sexual molestation, he is given legal immunity by a compliant Supreme Court.  He then goes on to win the following Presidential election, with the help of a huge injection of money from the richest man in the world.  This time, he surrounds himself with yes men and delegates the richest man in the world to downsize his government and make it more vulnerable to massive corruption.  All the while he is having long private phone conversations with Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia, a former KGB agent, who is trained in manipulating psychologically vulnerable subjects. 

Then on the last day of February, one month after his second inauguration, he has a meeting in the oval office with Vladimir Zelensky, President of Ukraine, ostensibly about a mineral deal but really about giving Zelensky a public rebuke for rejecting a fake peace deal that, in fact, hands Ukraine over to Putin, the aggressor.  

At this point the Manchurian candidate reveals his real intentions by criticizing Zelensky for hating Putin and not trusting Putin’s word, saying he has known Putin for a long time, and the two of them have both suffered from unfair investigations to do with his first impeachment trial.  The Manchurian Candidate unceremoniously sends Zelensky on his way while he starts the process of abandoning military aid to Ukraine, withdrawing from the Nato Alliance with Western democracies, dropping sanctions against Russia, and establishing military, economic and intelligence ties with Russia.  To be continued.

Russia Russia Russia!

 You know, one thing I’ve always been aware of, ever since Donald Trump came down that escalator in 2015, was how he’s never had a critical word to say about Vladamir Putin.  How the Russians did him a big favour later that year, by hacking into the emails of  the Democratic party and publishing them on the internet, at the same time as Trump was under fire for making sexist remarks about grabbing women’s genitals. 

How Trump’s first campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was previously the campaign advisor for Victor Yanukovych, Putin’s pick for Ukrainian President,  who was thrown out of office by a spontaneous uprising of Ukrainians in 2014, known as the Maidan revolution, leaving Manafort without a job and in debt for a million dollars to a Russian oligarch, until he teamed up with the Trump campaign.

Or, how, when a journalist asked Trump about his support for a murderer like Putin, Trump shrugged it off, and said the U.S. was no better.  How Trump was under investigation by the FBI for his connections to the Russians (the Mueller investigation) which did not find Trump guilty of collusion, but did uncover Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election, which Trump won, and did lead to the indictment of some of Trump’s associates for concealing Russian income - Manafort, and lying about meeting with the Russians - Flynn.

Or, in 2018 at the Helsinki Summit with Putin, when asked by a journalist if he believed his own Intelligence reports that the Russians had interfered in the 2016 Presidential election, Trump said no, instead he believed Putin, because Putin had very strongly denied the charge to him personally.

And let’s not forget that during his Presidency, Trump tried to blackmail Zelensky by threatening to withhold military aid to Ukraine if Zelensky didn’t launch a public investigation based on Trump’s Russian dis-information on his Presidential rival, Joe Biden, a crime for which Trump was impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives in 2019.

 

Or that in 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, Trump had complimented Putin as a “genius”, saying “Putin’s smart.’ I mean, he’s taking over a country for two dollars’ worth of sanctions,” “I’d say that’s pretty smart. He’s taking over a country – really a vast, vast location, a great piece of land with a lot of people, and just walking right in.”

So,I was angered but not surprised last week, when Trump turned on Zelensky and blamed Ukraine for Putin’s invasion, and then tried to force a manifestly unfair demand for  Ukrainian mineral rights in exchange,not for any real guarantees, but in order to pay for U.S. military aid. Is this what the United States has come to? Siding with the aggressor, Putin?  Extorting another country in a protection racket?  And then to top it off this week the United States for the first time, siding with Russia and North Korea in voting against a U.N. resolution in support of Ukraine!  Welcome to the axis of evil, America! 

There is no doubt that Trump looks up to Putin, that he admires his ruthlessness and savagery, and that he despises democracies like Ukraine and Canada.  This is a U.S. president who wants to go back to the nineteenth century, when great powers were carving up Africa and Asia, who actually wants to be on the same side of the table as Putin, letting him take Ukraine and the Baltics, so that he, Trump, can similarly physically expand the United States by taking over Canada, Greenland, and Mexico.

Trump is a moral cretin, a psychopath, who has no empathy for anyone, who sees the world entirely in terms of winners and losers.  He is incapable of understanding the vital importance of the Ukraine war for defending Western democracies against Russian aggression.   The Ukrainians have suffered the loss of millions fleeing to other countries because of Russia’s indiscriminate bombing; they’ve lost land, some of  their cities to the Russians, many soldiers killed or wounded, many citizens tortured and murdered and thousands of their children kidnapped, in Putin’s criminal invasion. But the Ukrainians are actually doing the Western world an incalculable service by holding the line against Putin’s aggression and degrading his military.  Unlike the last world war, we in the West don't have to send our soldiers, the Ukrainians are fighting for us, holding Russia back.  All we have to do is support them with weapons.  It’s a very cheap price to pay for what we are getting, and a very high sacrifice for the Ukrainians.  But if the U.S. stops supporting Ukraine and tries to force a deal favoring Putin, which it looks like Trump is about to do, and if the Ukraine were to lose this war as a result, the consequences would be catastrophic for the entire world.  We would then not have the luxury of avoiding direct involvement in the war, because, one way or another, the war would come home to us.

The Unified Reich

 I don’t know if many readers will remember an American video about a year ago heralding a “Unified Reich”  and calling for “a New International Order”, but events have now caught up with the video’s message if what transpired at last weekend’s Munich Security Conference is any indication.  The U.S. Vice President, J.D. Vance openly embraced German neo-nazis and then lectured Europe on worrying too much about Russian and Elon Musk’s attempts to influence their elections. He chided Europeans for paying insufficient  attention to “the enemy within”, a chilling phrase that echoes Trump, but also invokes Adolf HItler’s rage against the Jews and the left in the Weimar Republic.  Who among us can forget Elon Musk’s triumphant “Sig Heil” the day of Trump’s inauguration?  Or Trump’s very recent statement “He who saves the country does not violate the law.”  Together, these events seem to me a repeat of the Nazi slogan:  “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer!”  in English: “One People, (i.e. Maga), One State, One Leader” - in other words, a “Unified Reich”.  

Trump’s claim that he is saving the country is the exact opposite of what he is doing. Because taking a wrecking ball to the U.S. government and its agencies, conducting mass firings of civil servants, and destroying and withholding government data has deadly consequences that go far beyond the initial performative shock and awe.  Civil servants serve the people;  they uphold the laws of the land, hold industrial polluters to account, protect consumers from fraud, ensure schools and hospitals are up to standard, prevent tainted food or dangerous medicine from being circulated,  inform the public about recent outbreaks of infectious diseases, of danger from extreme weather, and much much more.  By shutting down these government agencies and firing their employees, Musk and Trump are putting the entire population of the United States at risk.  

The wholesale destruction of government data is revealing in itself.  What better way of covering your tracks than getting rid of the evidence?  Taking away public data and funding for public research ensures that Trump’s government can flood the zone with propaganda, effectively depriving people of the means to check and monitor what their government is actually doing, or of what the consequences could be.

When the government shuts down public data and watchdog agencies, they are guaranteed to be up to no good.  Note, that we’ve seen this before when Stephen Harper was Prime Minister of Canada, and he defunded Canadian environmental science, muzzled government scientists, and actually threw the research literature into dumpsters.  Harper, who like candidate Pierre Poilievre, is closely allied with the Fossil Fuel industry, was banking on the principle that without good data, it is impossible for the public to get accurate  knowledge of the consequences of these industries emitting carbon dioxide and other pollutants, and how they ought to be mitigated.  Depriving citizens of the means to monitor the health of their environment doesn’t seem very consistent with democratic principles, does it? And if you, the enquiring reader, see a pattern here with right wing governments, fossil fuel companies, and the erosion of democracy,  you may be onto something. 

OK, but you may be thinking, with all the tech billionaires hanging with Trump at the inaugural, where were the oil barons, the Koch brothers, the head of Exxon, etc.?  Well, those guys prefer to be in the background, but rest assured their lavish funding is very busy behind the scenes doing a lot of the work of supporting Republican and Conservative party candidates as well as producing a  constant flood of misinformation about climate change and the benefits of fossil fuels. 

The thing is, few have any idea how deep this subterfuge is, or how far back it goes.  And surprise, surprise, it goes way back.  I’ve just finished listening to the audio version of Canadian author Carol Off’s book:  At a Loss For Words:  Conversations in an Age of Rage.  Besides being an author, Carol is even better known for being a host on the CBC radio show “As it Happens.” which provided a lot of the material for the book.  In her book she takes six words:  “freedom”, “democracy”, “truth”, “woke”, “choice”, and “taxes”,  and shows how their meanings have been deliberately twisted and distorted by the extreme right.  

The original initiative for the modern right comes from a small group of economists and evangelical Christians, who objected to the U.S. federal government’s campaign of desegregation in the 1960’s, and from rich oil men, namely the Koch brothers, who didn’t like democracy,  being taxed, and being fined for dumping toxins into the air and water. With the oil oligarch’s money they created an entire ecosystem of interconnected right wing think tanks:  The Heritage Foundation, The Cato Foundation, The Heartland Institute, The American Legislative Council, known as ALEC, which manufactures made-to-measure union-busting, anti-environmental, anti-abortion laws on demand, and let’s not forget The Federalist Society, funded by dark money, which has been instrumental in selecting Supreme Court judges in order to overturn Roe vs Wade’s legalization of abortion. 

Which brings us to Trump’s in-your-face oligopoly and project 2025, produced by the Heritage Foundation. 

 What we are seeing with Doge’s wholesale destruction of government agencies and Trump and Musk’s lawbreaking is the culmination of the extreme right's plans to get rid of democracy.  What appears as out and out chaos is actually the point.  If the U.S. government is gravely weakened, public data destroyed, and civil servants fired en mass, then the government is likely to fail at protecting its citizens.  If science and higher education is defunded then there will be no independent sources of knowledge and everyone will be at  the mercy of the peddlers of disinformation.  As a result Americans will have even less trust in government and in scientific knowledge than they have already,  and there will be no objective standards to hold those in charge accountable. It’s rule by the rich, otherwise known as - Oligopoly.  Trump sees more in common with Putin’s Russia  than he does with  a democracy like Canada’s.  Getting rid of democracy - That’s the “the Unitary Reich” and “New International Order”.

Nice Country You've Got There Buddy!

 Nice country you got there buddy!  You wouldn’t want your economy to get hurt now, would you?  It would be a shame, a real shame - a nice country like yours - getting hit by nasty tariffs!  A real shame!  But, you know, there’s something you could do for me……

Since Mr Trump’s election we can kiss goodbye  to the “rules based order”  and say hello to obeisance to the “strongman”and the billionaire pals of the strongman divvying up the economic system.  With Trump we are very likely to see international organizations like the U.N., and other international agreements and institutions downgraded and bypassed through separate deals between individual nations.   Instead of “win win”  we’ll get “lose lose”, as jobs are lost and inflation soars.   The United Nations was constructed to prevent another world war, the International Monetary Fund and GATT, to avoid global depressions and the tariff wars that can precipitate them. The World Health Organization or W.H.O. works to promote global health.  It helps to control disease outbreaks like polio, HIV, Ebola, and Covid.  Containing a disease like Ebola in one country is a boon to every country.   Once these international organizations are fatally weakened,  we will find ourselves much closer to the conditions leading to another world war.  

Lots of people want to burn it all down: all the peace, order, and good government that we had, all the institutions that we built that helped many of us to flourish.  When we look at governments as gangs with a big man on top, all that flourishing goes away and we are looking at a dog eat dog world - in other words - at Social Darwinism. It’s going to be: survival of the biggest meanest son-of-a-bitch!

In Trump we have an American President who literally sees Putin, Hitler, and the Mafiosa, i.e., the aptly named “Mob”,as his lifelong role models.  Secrecy, loyalty, escalation instead of compromise, never admitting mistakes, and saving face above all else.  All of the above - the opposite of good government. 

 Conservatives used to tell us that character is an essential component of leadership. Once they fell for Trump’s endless lies they stopped believing in character.  We are about to relearn this lesson the hard way!

My guess is that Trump’s election is going to accelerate the breakup of the “United” States, and, if we let him, Canada. When Donald Trump made that little joke to Trudeau, about Canada joining the states, it wasn’t a joke.  We should keep our eyes on Canadian politicians because the next few years are going to prove their mettle or prove their spinelessness.  This is a real test for Canadians using live ammunition - no joke! In Canada we have a truly great country. We need to keep it that way by standing up to Donald Trump and rejecting all of his corrupt tactics.

Trudeau's luck may have changed

 We all know that Justin Trudeau has gone past his due date, after three terms as Prime Minister.  There’s a rising visceral hate-on for the guy which, in my opinion, is undeserved.  We’ve all heard the anti-Trudeau rage, but what is it based on, other than fatigue? 

We have a “Prime Minister in waiting”, Pierre Poilievre, a very effective leader of the opposition, who is crushing Trudeau in the polls.  Poilievre is really good at tossing out slogans that rhyme:  “axe the tax”, etc.,  but not so good at envisioning anything better, as far as an actual set of responsible policies.  For a  long time now, it looked as if the Trudeau Liberals were headed for decisive defeat in the next election. Now things have become a lot less certain, and the reason is the post-election whirlwind south of the border.

I think that the election of Donald Trump has done more to unify Canada than anything in our collective memories since the Second World War.  His proposed tariffs could wreak real havoc.   And once Trump dropped his tariff bombshell, all of a sudden the Trudeau hate fest seemed kind of passe. We got to see a bunch of provincial premiers make fools of themselves by telegraphing their desperation to cave to any and all of Trump’s cockamaimie demands. It was truly pathetic! And in the face of Trump’s destructive flailing, Poilievre, the one-trick pony, reacted by  doubling down on his harsh criticisms of the Prime Minister. 

 Trudeau was decisive. He  quickly convened a summit of the Premiers. Within the week he had called Trump and flown to Mara Lago for a face-to-face with the Whirlwind himself.

 

  Reminds me of a story in the Bible; it’s in the Old Testament; something about a guy with bad luck whose luck changes when he insists on having it out with a whirlwind.  

Trump doesn’t actually become president for another month.  But when he does he will sow nothing but chaos.  If Trudeau is smart, he will do his utmost to put off the election as long as possible,(my suggestion - a full year after the American election.) We don’t need a divisive election campaign when we are faced with a devastating threat to our economy from an external foe. 

In a year Trudeau will seem like an island of stability compared to the gathering storm down south.  But as for Poilievre, I bet that his “attack-dog” imitation of Trump will not go down well. And, as they say: those who sow the wind reap the whirlwind.

The Storm the Day After

 There’s been a series of gales in Prince Rupert that began the day after the American Election.  The first Morning after, I was taking my wife up to catch the bus to Terrace at 8:00 up on  summit hill, and she almost got blown over by the gusts. The wind and rain were vicious and relentless. I stayed inside as much as I could and watched the waves of hard rain and the branches of the big spruce lash back and forth in the heavy gusts.  

It’s wonderful to be cozy and warm indoors and know that you are safe even in the midst of a storm.  Some people are not so lucky though.  Like the people in the Caribbean  and the American South who get struck by hurricanes.  When your house is in the path of a hurricane the immense power of the wind can turn it into a deadly foe as the house goes from a means of protection to a lethal barrage of exploding timber in a split second.

Maybe you can see where I’m going here.  We can feel safe and secure here in Canada as Americans do their destructive thing. But the United States is the biggest economy in the world. For that reason alone the effects of this foreign election will be destructive around the globe, but especially in Canada because the U.S. is our biggest trading partner. 

 

Democratic elections are always going to be divisive to some degree; the American Presidential election, because so much is at stake, is decidedly so.  Less than a month ago we had a very close provincial election, and the NDP scraped back to power, with the Conservatives breathing down their necks.  And we wait for the coming Federal election which we all know will occur sometime next year.  Elections can be divisive, but as Canadians we have faith that whoever gets into power will be reasonably competent at governing or else they will be voted out of office in four years or less.  That used to be the case in the U.S. but it isn’t anymore. With Donald Trump we are looking at a world of chaos for who knows how long.  It’s great to live in a safe, prosperous country like Canada, but we should never take it for granted.  Sometimes a big wind comes from the south and it is strong enough to uproot everything.