Harvey Gold

Just as Herbert Hoover, the last Republican “businessman” did, President Trump and the GOP has implemented isolationism, personal enrichment, and a gross ignorance of knowledge about governmental economics, into a death spiral for the U.S., in the world leadership role. Incidentally, Hoover also had an all-Republican Congress at his disposal. Big frigging surprise!

First, they are ceding U.S. standing in the world to our enemies and destroying our economy while the fact-verse Trump/GOP acolytes stand by and let it happen. In essence, this faux policy of “Making America First” is “Making America Worst” on the world stage both politically and economically, on its own citizens, and more vulnerable to our enemies, not to mention plain ole natural disasters.

And the real kicker is that neither Trump nor any of his family businesses have re-located a single one of their manufacturing concerns from the sweatshop countries they are using to make their own bullshit products, that adds to the trade deficit and unemployment by shipping them back to the U.S. at exorbitant prices.

To examine how quickly Trump/Republicans are isolating the U.S. from vital allies, destroying our economy, increasing our susceptibility to terrorism, and putting our nation in harm’s way from weather-related disasters, like hurricanes Harvey and Irma vividly illustrate, will cost taxpayers lives, businesses, and hundreds of billions of taxpayer money–consider:

  • German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s  comments following NATO and G7 meetings attended by Donald Trump declared a new chapter in U.S.-European relations after contentious meetings with President Trump by declaring that Europe “really must take our fate into our own hands.”

Merkel, Europe’s de facto leader, told a packed rally in Munich that the days when her continent could rely on the U.S. was “over to a certain extent. This is what I have experienced in the last few days.”

  • Equally disquieting is the fact that the new President of France, Emmanuel Macron, compared President Trump to Putin and Turkey’s Erdogan.

Our European allies appeared to have been hoping for the best after Trump’s election. But Trump wasted no time in shattering those hopes:

  • After telling Arab leaders that he wasn’t there to lecture them, Trump berated our NATO allies with his false claim that they owed massive amounts of money to the alliance and U.S. taxpayers.
  • At a meeting on trade, Trump suggested that Germany was bad because of the millions of cars they are selling to the U.S.
  • Trump was the only G7 leader to not affirm the Paris Agreement, which led to a failure to agree on a statement about climate change.

Leadership Ceded to Other Countries in Electricity, Fossil Fuel Independence, and National Security

The comments from Merkel and Macron have prompted a realignment of this country’s decades-old relationship with our European allies. It is hard to escape the idea that Trump’s efforts were intended to destabilize our relationships with NATO and the G7 countries—a strategy that just so happens to align perfectly with what Putin has been attempting to do for years.

This is why there’s growing European discussion of an extreme option to replace US commitments: like a Euro nukes program .

And it’s not just Putin who will benefit from these changes. Trump is abdicating U.S. leadership on both climate change and trade, while the Conservative Caucus in the House of Representatives is repeatedly endangering the status of the U.S. dollar as the world’s PetroCurrency and World reserve currency, from which the U.S. makes billions of dollars every year, by constantly threatening to default on our promises of payments that they themselves approved.

In the meantime, China is working to position itself as the global leader on renewable energy, with the new backing of our own former European allies. This brazen act of international stupidity by the U.S. was the direct result of Trump’s ham-fisted handling of the G8 (now G7) Conference, during which Trump formally withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accord.

Additionally, it’s not just climate change that is at stake in Trump and the GOP’s idiotic climate denier roles. U.S. security and defense against a supposed Trump campaign focus, anti-terrorism, is making all the wrong moves.

While the Trump’s focus on terrorism is a nonsensical travel ban, or a stupid, ineffectual border wall, Germany, Australia, France, and now even, China have begun aggressively implementing non-centralized power grids to guard against terrorism, the freakish intensifying of worldwide weather-related disasters, and the enormous cost to lives and property each year from fires in drought-stricken areas that last decades, to rising sea levels from melting polar regions, to the loss of species after species of vital links in the planet’s food chain.

In order to protect their electorates from the American vulnerabilities that are continuing to be inflicted on millions of citizens, businesses, and disruptions to mass commerce when extended power outages occur, 48% of all German single-family residences are already independent of the German power grid and are encouraged to sell back excess home power generation from wind, solar or both, to the national grid for credits or cash. Australia and other forward-looking countries aren’t far behind. Germany has made it mandatory for all new construction to at least include the capability of being self-sustaining, sans fossil fuels, in case of weather-related or terrorist-related damage to the national power grid. (Note: In case you’ve forgotten, one of the biggest logistical headaches for Floridians trying to flee Irma’s wrath, was simply getting tanker trucks to the gas stations that were still open so that people could get gasoline to flee. This is 1970s-era problem-solving!).

Home and business self-sustaining stratagem would be especially appropriate for those areas of the U.S. that are under yearly susceptibility to the whims of Mother Nature, like we just saw with two of the U.S.’s largest, most heavily populated regions being without power, suffering business destruction and interruptions from the Houston, TX area and most of Florida to eastern Georgia/South Carolina. It would also clearly benefit the entire mid-Atlantic to Maine region.

This same strategy would mitigate the pain and suffering from earthquakes and eliminate the destruction that occurs when natural gas lines explode that can take out entire blocks in populated earthquake-susceptible locations on the west coast with no warning. At least with hurricanes, people have weeks to flee.

When China is more progressive in their disfavor of fossil fuels and emergency preparedness than the U.S., something has gone dramatically wrong; and I think we all know that it begins and ends with the GOP need for big oil companies’ dark money funding their campaigns, continuing to believe that tax cuts to the wealthy will stimulate growth, and propaganda against climate change in order to maintain market dominance for fossil fuel companies.

China, who covets America’s World Reserve Currency designation, has pledged at least $360 billion by 2020 and has announced that it, the world’s largest automobile market, will ban fossil fuel automobiles by 2040.

  • Even more importantly, while we’ve been focused on unraveling the connection between Trump and Russia, China recently held a gathering of global leaders to gather support for their “Belt and Road Initiative.”

China is aiming to re-create Marco Polo’s ancient “Silk Road” that connected Europe to Asia—a $1.4 trillion network of modern trading routes, that analysts suggest would shift the center of global economy and obliterate the U.S.-led world order. There are no number of American nukes, not GOP/Trump grandstanding that can stop this from happening, and the GOP/Trump leaderships know this.

That’s $1.4 trillion in, “New roads, high-speed rail, renewable power plants, pipelines, ports, airports, and telecommunication links that would boost commerce between China and 60 countries in Asia, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. slinks back into a protectionist rabbit hole by alienating major trading partners Mexico, Canada, China, and all other trading partners; reminiscent of the 1920 strategy of Herbert Hoover and the GOP that caused the Great Depression.

Less than 24 hours after the US president announced his decision to withdraw from the 2015 Paris Accord and strike a new, less ambitious deal with the rest of the world, Brussels (NATO’s headquarters) declared its outright refusal to even engage in such ridiculous talks.

Donald Tusk, the president of the European council, described Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris pact as a big mistake but said the fight against climate change and dependence on fossil fuels would continue with or without the US.

“China and Europe have demonstrated solidarity with future generations and responsibility for the whole planet,” Tusk added, in reference to a joint EU-China statement that vowed to “step up” efforts on global warming, including the raising of $100 billion a year by 2020 to help poorer countries cut emissions.

In Britain, Theresa May faced criticism for not agreeing to join the declaration by Germany, France, and Italy in opposition to the US move.

That leaves the U.S. and the UK in an uncomfortable position which mirrors the exact same alignment that took place just before the beginning of the Great Depression. All that we need to do now, in order to complete the absolute replication of events prior to the Great Depression, is re-adopt the Gold Standard as the backing for U.S. currency since we’ve already repealed each and every protection afforded post-Great Depression.

The GOP is so dependent on the deep pockets of fossil fuel companies, that the taxpayers of the U.S. pick up the tab for 70% of the rent that foreign oil companies pay to other foreign oil platform companies…to the tune of $4 billion a year, for which American taxpayers get no cost breaks on oil, no tax breaks on oil, just dark money pouring into GOP campaigns. If this is Trump/GOP’s way to “Make America Great” it’s courting disaster for our kids and grandkids.

And for an administration that was going to “drain the swamp”, how the hell do Trump supporters and Republicans justify Trump’s Secretary of the Treasury using a government jet, at a cost to taxpayers of $25,000 an hour, to jet-set around the world with his new blonde, model bride, half his age, for their honeymoon–for weeks? The total cost to American taxpayers for this two-week honeymoon extravaganza? $8,400,000.00 + Secret Service around-the-clock salaries and overtime+the happy couple’s personal expenses unknown. Let’s round it off at $10 million of taxpayer-funded honeymooning!! Got-dammit, can anyone with a monkey’s brain condone this???

The U.S. can not continue to make such stupid moves without dire consequences. Then again, we might not have to. The damage done already to our world standing is a first in the modern era and could very well be enough. When combined with a burgeoning lack of competent leadership in Congress and the White House, which combined seems to have less knowledge of U.S. history, much less governmental economic basic knowledge, and less logical thought processes than a clan of gerbils.

Harvey Gold