I am a Sovereigntist if you aren't too you don't love the USA
[URL]https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/02/opinion/trump-panama-greenland-foreign-policy.html[/URL]
Isolationist? Nationalist? No, Trump Is Something Else Entirely.
Feb. 2, 2025.
A black-and-white photo illustration shows a ship navigating the Panama Canal as if were seen through a pair of binoculars.
Credit. Photo Illustration by The New York Times; Source Photograph by Alejandro Cegarra for The New York Times.
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By Jennifer Mittelstadt.
Ms. Mittelstadt, a professor of USA History at Rutgers University, studies the state, the military and political movements.
When President Trump started talking about regaining control of the Panama Canal, colleagues and friends barraged me with questions. Where did this seemingly out-of-the-blue interest in a long-since-yielded area of control come from? How did a fit of pique about tolls and China grow into a threat to force Panama to cede its territory to the United States? Was there some kind of larger rationale that might explain it?
They asked me because for more than seven years, I have been studying conservative activists and their views of 20th-century foreign policy. If anyone should know, they reasoned, I should. But for all the time I've spent in libraries and archives, I was as flummoxed as anyone about the historical roots of Mr. Trump's worldview.
The historical literature doesn't provide much guidance. Historians tend to slot conservatives into three major, sometimes overlapping, groups: anti-communists, defense hawks and neoconservative nation builders. Those proved awkward fits for Mr. Trump in his first term, gesturing toward but not capturing his essence. Yes, he routinely called his enemies communists, but then embraced (and later spurned) the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. Yes, he boasted about American military power, but then seemed to defer to Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin. He claimed to want American troops out of Afghanistan, but failed to conclusively follow through. With his penchant for personal and transactional politics, and his often purposeful unpredictability, the man was almost impossible to categorize.
Historians instead pulled out a category that has rarely been used to describe anyone on the right for 75 years. Noting Mr. Trump's rhetoric, they dubbed him an isolationist, like some of the conservatives who opposed the United States' entrance into World War II.
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Yet Mr. Trump's recent moves demonstrated the limits of that moniker. Annexing Canada? Taking over Greenland? Demanding possession of the Panama Canal? How could those threats to take foreign territory square with isolationism?
There is, it turns out, a little examined strain of history that provides a fresh way to understand his instincts. Hidden in plain sight in the dusty papers and collections of everyday right-wing Americans lies a whole new way of thinking about Mr. Trump's foreign policy. He is a "sovereigntist. ".
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American sovereigntist politics originated over 100 years ago in the moment of profound crisis and possibility of 1919, when the world undertook a referendum of sorts on the surge in globalization that preceded World War I. Nations, increasingly interconnected, were rocked by the halt in trade and migration that followed the war's conclusion. At the same time, empires collapsed and new nationalist movements emerged or flourished, with the result that some states died and altogether new ones were born.
Amid this dramatic change emerged a proposal for a novel form of supranational government — the League of Nations. As diplomats and lawyers hammered out guidelines, they prompted fierce debate over the purpose of nation states and sovereignty. Advocates of global trade and migration, colonial independence movements, Black internationalists, socialists, communists and liberal Christians cheered the arrival of worldwide governance, in which many found the promise of self-determination, international public law and a subdued nationalism.
But many despised the idea, and here lie the origins of the American sovereigntist movement — and its modern heirs. In 1919, a group of senators known as the "irreconcilables" blocked the United States from joining the League of Nations. They were backed by a grass-roots movement of patriotic organizations, veterans' groups and Protestant fundamentalists who argued that the League aimed to usurp American governance. In their words, it would replace the Constitution with world government, diminish America's unique history and culture, and allow uncivilized, nonwhite and non-Christian states to exert power over its citizens.
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"The welfare of the Nation has been made subordinate to Internationalism," said Louis Coolidge, an ally of the League critic Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. "Our creed," he said, "is to keep alive the fires of Nationality. ".
Their movement aimed to preserve not only America's formal sovereignty in international relations, but also the traditional forms of rule to which its white, native-born leaders were accustomed. Driven by a keen sense of the virtues of Anglo-Saxon self-governance, they understood international cooperation as a threat to their personal sovereignty as well as that of their nation.
Sovereigntist politics persisted and evolved as the features and scope of liberal and left-wing internationalism took new forms. In the 1930's, they helped lead the America First movement, which opposed entrance in World War II on the side of the Allies. Far from isolationism, sovereigntists openly championed the anti-internationalism of the fascists, supported Gen. Francisco Franco's Nationalist rebellion in Spain, and accepted — even cheered — the regimes in Nazi Germany and fascist Italy that thumbed their noses at the collapsing League of Nations. The Rev. Norman Vincent Peale, the minister who married Mr. Trump and his first wife, Ivana, joined the sovereignty movement in this early period.
After World War II, sovereigntists launched a protracted battle against the United Nations. During Mr. Trump's youth in the 1950's, that battle birthed a host of new organizations and leaders who took up anti-internationalist politics, many of which, like the John Birch Society, are familiar to Americans today. They resisted American participation in the International Court, which they dubbed the World Court; the North Atlantic Treaty Organization; and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the forerunner to the World Trade Organization; viewing them all as threats to American governance. In their view, the you. And. 's covenants and agencies undermined the civilizing authority of white, Christian nations by offering membership and influence to communists, Asians and Africans.
Later, many fought international sanctions on the "brave little country" of Rhodesia, as the right-wing lawyer and radio host Clarence Manion called it, likening its fight to preserve white rule to the American fight for independence. Sovereigntists led the mobilization against the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, the law that loosened immigration for the first time in four decades, which, they argued, embodied the ultimate plot of internationalists — eliminating national borders.
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Here the Panama Canal comes into the frame. In the 1950's and 1960's, Panamanians began to invoke you. And. Charters and the International Court's rules on disputed territories to challenge the United States' authority over the canal and gain support of the you. And. To transfer it to Panama. Sovereigntists called this a plot to steal American territory that was, in the words of the Patrick Henry League of New York, "ours, just as much ours as the Capitol dome and the national anthem. ".
From the late 1950's through the 1960's, a coalition of groups such as the Committee on Pan American Policy and the American Coalition of Patriotic Societies chastised Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson for making concessions to Panamanian demands. The critics would lose. In 1973, the Panamanian leader, Omar Torrijos, delivered the coup de grâce when he hosted the you. And. Security Council in Panama for a hearing on the "colony in the heart of my country. " Alongside significant local protests, the event pressured the United States to negotiate a treaty that would grant Panama full control. President Jimmy Carter signed it in 1977, enraging sovereigntists, whose decades-old cause finally caught the interest of influential new conservatives including the presidential candidate Ronald Reagan.
The sovereigntist movement went on in the 1980's to defend South Africa against you. And. Sanctions, and successfully pressured Mr. Reagan, then the president, to withdraw from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, which promoted peace and human rights through culture and education. When the Cold War ended, their crusade became even more relevant. Internationalism was the only game in town — the "New World Order" as President George H. W. Bush and others called it. The United States pursued multilateral trade agreements, forged a new neoliberal consensus and engaged its military in international peacekeeping efforts in Somalia and later the Balkans.
That was exactly what sovereigntists had always feared, and in their resistance they anticipated the wider populist backlash against globalization that helped drive Mr. Trump's popularity. Viewed from the perspective of the recurring battles between those who accept international governance as a tool to project American power and those who fear it as a humiliating surrender of American autonomy, Mr. Trump's threat to retake the Panama Canal shows how sovereignty politics today suffuses the re-energized Right.
In Mr. Trump, this movement has found its most influential champion. Well before Mr. Trump's talk of the USA Taking over the canal, his reanimation of the sovereigntist agenda was clearly visible. In his first term and during his four years out of office, sovereignty politics featured in his attacks on the you. And. , NATO and international agreements on trade and climate. They drove his restrictionist zeal to protect national borders against immigration. And they fueled Mr. Trump's love affairs with other skeptics of international organizations, such as Viktor Orban of Hungary or Georgia Meloni of Italy.
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There is little to be won predicting foreign policy in a second Trump administration. The influence of the sovereigntist movement may recede in the face of a president who is changeable and distracted. And some members of Mr. Trump's coalition do not subscribe to a purely sovereigntist standpoint, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio. But sovereigntists will surely double down. "International organizations and agreements that erode our Constitution, rule of law or popular sovereignty should not be reformed," Project 2025 explains. "They should be abandoned. ".
The most vigorous sovereigntists openly say they will seek withdrawal from the you. And. If necessary. They already oppose many proposed pacts and conventions, including the you. And. 's Pact for the Future, which addresses climate change and inequality. The Trump administration has said it intends to withdraw from the World Health Organization and has taken steps toward a near ban on immigration. It's likely to weaken the European Union, enfeeble NATO and oppose multicountry trade agreements like the revamped NAFTA. And it will seek to regain a kind of Monroe Doctrine-era control of the Western Hemisphere, no matter what happens with the canal.
Mr. Trump's embrace of sovereignty politics will only embolden similar regimes around the world. Brexit was a harbinger of other potential E. You. Exits. Nearly every right-wing party across Europe would consider one if they came to power.
Look for other countries, buoyed by Mr. Trump's scorn, to put the brakes on internationalism and instead build new, separate relationships with each other. What we would be left with is an unruly period for international relations, one that is less centralized and less governed by the shared principles and operating modes that lasted from the end of World War II until just a few years ago.
By Their Fruits You Shall Know Them
Of course, any Trump move or decision is by definition "dumb". How could it be any other way?
But what the Wall Street Journal has apparently not yet grasped is that Trump is doing this in large part in order to generate more tax revenue from the American Working Men and Women to pay for a deeper and more generous tax cut for President Elon Musk.
And to ultimately shift all that beautiful Global Trade to his beloved China.
[B]The Dumbest Trade War in History.
Trump will impose 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico for no good reason.
Jan. 31, 2025[/B]
[URL]https://www.wsj.com/opinion/donald-trump-tariffs-25-percent-mexico-canada-trade-economy-84476fb2[/URL]
[QUOTE]President Trump will fire his first tariff salvo on Saturday against those notorious American adversaries . . . Mexico and Canada. Theyll get hit with a 25% border tax, while China, a real adversary, will endure 10%. This reminds us of the old Bernard Lewis joke that its risky to be Americas enemy but it can be fatal to be its friend.
Leaving China aside, Mr. Trumps justification for this economic assault on the neighbors makes no sense. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt says theyve enabled illegal drugs to pour into America. But drugs have flowed into the U.S. for decades, and will continue to do so as long as Americans keep using them. Neither country can stop it.
..........
As the Cato Institutes Scott Lincicome puts it, the data show that as imports go up, U.S. production goes up. Thousands of good-paying auto jobs in Texas, Ohio, Illinois and Michigan owe their competitiveness to this ecosystem, relying heavily on suppliers in Mexico and Canada.
Tariffs will also cause mayhem in the cross-border trade in farm goods. In fiscal 2024, Mexican food exports made up about 23% of total U.S. agricultural imports while Canada supplied some 20%. Many top U.S. growers have moved to Mexico because limits on legal immigration have made it hard to find workers in the U.S. Mexico now supplies 90% of avocados sold in the U.S. Is Mr. Trump now an avocado nationalist?
..........
None of this is supposed to happen under the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement that Mr. Trump negotiated and signed in his first term. The U.S. willingness to ignore its treaty obligations, even with friends, wont make other countries eager to do deals. Maybe Mr. Trump will claim victory and pull back if he wins some token concessions. But if a North American trade war persists, it will qualify as one of the dumbest in history.[/QUOTE]
The Rich pay very little to zero Federal Income Taxes
[QUOTE=EihTooms;2980092]Sorry, American Working Men and Women. President Musk needs a deeper and more generous tax cut. You paying an additional 10%-25% in Trump Tariff Taxes on the American Consumer for so many things is nice. But that will not be enough to do it: [B]To help pay for Trump tax cuts, new taxes on work perks become GOP target.[/B]
[URL]https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/02/to-help-pay-for-trump-tax-cuts-new-taxes-on-work-perks-are-gop-target.html?__source=androidappshare[/URL]
To that determinative but relative handful of angry Muslims, all of the MAGAs and all of the other non Harris voters, thank you for your vote.[/QUOTE]I do not see a problem with anything you wrote.
1. Everyone who voted knows what they were going to get. Harris was not ready for PRIME TIME. I would prefer Deion Sanders for President over Harris. At least he is PRIME TIME tested.
2. This gives everyone incentive to get off the government / corporate wage slave plantations and learn how to create a flow and build a stack that endures over generations.
Anyone who knows anything about the tax code if the USGOV knows the rich pay very little taxes.
[URL]https://youtu.be/RogUJp69YE4?si=wm0-qSbfzTdWNKxF[/URL]
Where are you coming up with this diarrhea? ET did you hijack his acct?
[QUOTE=Elvis2008;2980171]Well, China is by far the biggest producer of cars, [URL]https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/car-production-by-country[/URL].
Asian cars are the highest quality, [URL]https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/car-reliability-owner-satisfaction/who-makes-the-most-reliable-cars-a7824554938/[/URL].
Asia-based automakers continue to lead the industry in reliability, with an overall average score of 57 for the region on a scale of 1 to 100. This year, 8 of the 10 most reliable brands are from Asian brands. European automakers are in second place at 48. Domestic (USA) brands trail both with an average score of 38.
Where the car is built seems to matter though less than who is building it.
[URL]https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/automotive-industry/chinese-made-cars-in-us-market-a3786571662/[/URL]
"From a build quality perspective, I've never noticed anything abnormal or different based on where a vehicle is assembled. I wouldn't be able to tell you without looking it up or checking the sticker," Knizek says.
I do not like this as an objective measure but when you look at consumer complaints, China is even. [URL]https://china.jdpower.com/press-release/2024-IQS[/URL].
Porsche ranks highest in initial quality among premium brands with a score of 192 PP100. Lexus (207 PP100) ranks second and Cadillac (211 PP100) ranks third.
Chery ranks highest in initial quality among Chinese domestic brands with a score of 203 PP100. Geely (204 PP100) ranks second and GAC Trumpchi (206 PP100) ranks third.
And the best scores are in Japanese-Chinese partnerships: GAC Honda ranks highest in initial quality among mass market brands for a fifth consecutive year, with a score of 195 PP100. Dongfeng Honda (198 PP100) ranks second and GAC Toyota (200 PP100) ranks third.
When you have these partnerships, the Chinese see all the best knowledge of the world's car companies. They have dirt cheap engineers they can hire, and they have the world's biggest supply chain. They are building more cars than anyone else and IMO the more you do, the better you get.
Still, the guy I know who owns the dealerships was talking about an objective assessment of vehicles and not subjective consumer complaints. He said the Chinese car companies as of now and not a China-Japan partnership and not two years ago were producing the most flawless cars ever made. Feel free to think that is bullshit but IMO that result was inevitable.[/QUOTE]"They are building more cars than anyone else and IMO the more you do, the better you get. ".
But not with the CCP everything they do gets worse over time, I suspect they just squeeze out more and more profit and reduce the cost of inputs.
I bought what I thought was a nice hammer for $40 from Home Depot online after about 2 hours of use the head flew off, MADE IN CCPland stamped on it of course.
Anything Walmart Target Amazon sells is all trash headed straight for the landfill after one use (if you're lucky) sawblades etc.
Their nails bend when you strike them WTF!
Don't even buy anything with electric components in IT lololololol.
I have thrown away so much crap after one use or wash, underwear from Target after one wash the seams were separating.
I bought what I thought was a nice black silverware set from Target online after 1 or 2 cycles in the dishwasher the paint was coming off and the screws were falling out of the handles.
Garbage CCP cars will not be sold in the USA thanks to politicians with a fucking BRAIN.
Only Stoopid 3rd world poor people will buy their crap cars and they will regret it, rest ASSURED!!
Quintessential Bangkok Bob Lame as hell and childishly silly
[QUOTE=EihTooms;2980283]A half a day of decline in the S&P 500 and the Dow and Trump folded like a cheap lawn chair!
What happened to Mexico "taking advantage of us economically" and "other countries will pay us billions and we can fund everything from my brilliant tariffs"?
How the hell does a bunch of bored Mexican soldiers hanging around getting paid to look the other way while USA citizens smuggle drugs across the border have to do with those trade imbalances Trump was whining about and the billions in free money Mexico was going to pay us with those Trump Tariffs?
[B]Trump pauses Mexico tariffs for one month after agreement on border troops.[/B]
[URL]https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/03/trump-tariffs-mexico-canada-china-sheinbaum-responds.html?__source=androidappshare[/URL]
Meanwhile, his only "win" so far with all this Tariff bullshit is the president of Colombia agreed to let him continue doing what Obama and Biden were already doing in greater numbers and cheaper! Lolol.
And now we have this! Lololol.
"Catch and Release! Catch and Release"!
[B]Some migrants arrested in Trump's immigration crackdown have been released back into the U.S.
Space constraints and court orders have led ICE to release migrants on monitoring programs after they're arrested.
Feb. 3, 2025[/B]
[URL]https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/people-caught-trump-immigration-crackdown-released-us-rcna186360[/URL]
Gee, nobody knew a Mass Deportation was hard in the face of Constitutional Mandates and stingy Repub Congressional Budget Restraints. Lolol.
Well. Back to golf, golf and more golf.[/QUOTE]Mexico and Canada caved as fast as they could drop to their knees and lick Our Lord and Saviors ass clean for some mercy, just like that pussy Petro did in Bogota, none of the 3 could even last 24 hrs lololololol.
Next up is the EU, Xi, Seoul, Panama City et al LMFAO.
Fuck Mt Rushmore.
Start carving Our Lord and Savior across the entire Rockies NOW!
Donald J Trump is a living GOD!!
