Dumb on Climate

The big deal this news cycle (down to 4 hours in a Trump administration) is Trump’s trashing of the Paris Climate Control Agreement. But there is a second big deal going on that most have missed in all the noise about Trumps blunder in Paris. That is a story by Michael Isikoff of Yahoo that accuses members of the administration with being asked to find ways to reduce sanctions on Russia and return their missions that were seized by the Obama administration because they were found to be spy nests messing in our elections.

According to Isikoff’s heavily sourced story this started as soon as the Trump administration took office.

“Unknown to the public at the time, top Trump administration officials, almost as soon as they took office, tasked State department staffers with developing proposals for the lifting of economic sanctions, the return of diplomatic compounds and other steps to relieve tensions with Moscow.”

The continuing question; why were Trump and his people so intent n making nice with the Russians? It’s clear that they want the story to go away because in Trump’s ego driven mind Russian interference matched with his loss of the popular vote, equates with an illegitimate win of the Presidency and diminishes his view of himself. This is unacceptable to an egomaniac like Trump so something had to be done. That’s why Yates and Comey were fired.

But the big question is; if Trump and his lackeys weren’t involved in the Russian hack of our election process, why is he acting so obsequious towards Putin? Is it just his fawning love of dictators, already shown with Duterte and Erdagon or is something else running around in that damaged mind?

It might be acceptable if Trump and the Trumpnzees are just trying to set up a circumstance where they want to open a dialog with an enemy that could lead to better relations, more open communications and a lessening of tension between our countries that is acceptable. In fact that would be a positive action. But the likelihood of that being the case is a long way from reality. More to the point, Trump has already shown that he is only interested in protecting his personal interests in the Russian business community. His dumb son has already admitted that a great deal of their business is financed by Russian money, much of it, seemingly, semi-legal. It’s this scenario that Trump seems to be protecting in his attempts to sway various heads of our intelligence and criminal services to drop their investigations into Flynn, Kushner, Sessions and various other members of his administration. If this is the reality then Trump is a felon and must be treated as such. Presidential privilege covers a lot of bases but there are limits and the result of those limits could see the fat one staring out from behind bars.

Tom Malinowski, who had been Obama’s assistant secretary of state for human rights, told Yahoo News, “he too joined the effort to lobby congress after learning from former colleagues that the administration was developing a plan to lift sanctions and possibly arrange a summit between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin as part of an effort to achieve a ‘Grand bargain’ with Moscow.”

Such a meeting could possibly have gone a long way toward easing tensions between Russia and Balkan countries from NATO but it would certainly be a big win for Russia to finally get the American President to sit down with the ever aggressive Putin. What would we actually get out of such a meeting? It’s hard to say, but Trump would certainly solidify his personal financial ties with Moscow and the Russian oligarchs who are suspected of financing much of his empire.

Trump has made a lot of noise about one-sided deals. This would be the cream de la cream of one-sided deals and we would be on the short side. Trump wouldn’t be on the short side, but the United States would. This looks very much like our president selling out the country for his own financial benefit. What does the 35% have to say about that? Are they still true believers or are they really true fools?

But then there’s the crusher to all the conjecture and arguments. The members of the Trump administration have lied about each and every meeting, denying that they happened until it was proven that they had. Why? There can only be one logical reason. That reason is that they were doing something that they didn’t want anyone to know about. That would be colluding with the Russians in the attack on the Democrats in order to win a close election and in exchange, giving the Russians their buildings in NY and Maryland back and helping to lift the sanctions.

Yes there is one more possibility and it is that in exchange for help lifting the sanctions Trump and his thieving family would get concessions on Russian investment in Trump properties. Both of these are treasonous. If either is proven it should enable Trump’s enemies both Republican and Democratic to force him out of office. Of course that would leave the country with Mike Pence.

But enough of Trump’s petty, un-presidential maneuvers to expand his own financial empire. Let’s look at a big move that threatens to harm the entire planet. I’m speaking, of course, about his attempt to pull us out of the Paris Accords, the almost universal agreement to help limit the expansion of green house gasses in the planet’s atmosphere. When I say almost universal, it concerns the fact that only Nicaragua and Syria are non-signatory’s. That would put us in an alliance with those two non-functional countries against the rest of the world. It also removes us from world leadership! Once more putting the lie to Trump’s “Make America Great Again,” sloganizing.

But the reality is, there is no reason for Trump to try to pull us out of the Paris Accords other than that he promised he would in his campaign speeches. He knows nothing about what they say or what they represent. His minions from the cabinet know even less. Despite this they are all over the tube trying to defend his idiotic decision.

Look, the Accords are basically voluntary. They don’t nail anyone down to any position. They were put together to try to get China and India to get involved in some substantive way with climate control and they worked. The goals that we have set for ourselves in the Accords will not be met in any Trump led country simply because such a country will still be trying to pump up oil production, bring back coal mining from the grave and failing to realize that the growth of renewable energy is the real source of jobs in today’s economy.

The fact is, contrary to all the right wing lies, fossil fuels currently get far more government subsidies than renewables have ever gotten. The fact is, while jobs are disappearing in the fossil fuel industry we have created over five million new jobs in renewables just in the last couple of years. The fact is, if we don’t stop putzing around with a dead source of energy all the solar collectors on your roofs in the next ten years will be labeled MADE IN CHINA instead of MADE IN THE USA and the jobs that created them will indeed have been in Beijing.

But Donald Trump is too ignorant to realize that. Or maybe he’s not really that dumb. Maybe he’s just another greedy pig who is putting his fossil fuel investments ahead of your children’s health and your good. He’s certainly not helping this country maintain its position as the world’s leader. He is absolutely, by his decisions and his behavior, bringing down our prestige around the world. Trump, a man whose ego demands that he be held aloft as a symbol to be attained, has made himself into an international joke.

We live on a planet that is becoming increasingly smaller each year as technology surpasses itself. Trump thinks that he can take a continent and hide it in the bulrushes of his fantasies. We are of the world. Nothing, certainly not a demented old egomaniac will ever change that. So the question becomes do we lead the world or do we follow someone else? It’s obvious what Trump thinks and it’s just as obvious that he is wrong.

It’s not surprising that the giants of industry and creative service have all come out for recognition and solutions to the peril created by the fossil fuel industry. Only Trump, the Koch brothers, Sheldon Addelson and the fading barons of the decaying coal industry are holding on like perverse maggots, eating away at themselves as their last grasps at excess profit disintegrate under them.

Trump in his internationally televised announcement about abandoning the Paris Accords cannot help but throw in a little self-advertising, telling his audience that he will be attending a new coal mine opening. He gives no details because he understands that we all know it’s a lie but are too used to his lies to bother calling him on them.

But it isn’t a lie! It’s a real coalmine that will employ… wait for it! Seventy men! That’s right a whole seventy while the coal industry, right now, is losing about ten thousand jobs a year. In fact the mine in Pennsylvania will produce a special kind of coal that is used in smelting metals. So congratulations Don. While the auto industry is losing six thousand jobs this year and the coal industry about ten thousand and other industry God knows how many, you have scrounged up 70 jobs and are bragging about it on TV. While thousands of really good jobs are going begging because this country can’t supply workers with the background or education to do them, you are putting idiots like Betsy DeVos in cabinet positions that will keep Americans from ever getting the education that will enable them to get good jobs.

What’s really fascinating is that Trump probably doesn’t even see that the stuff he’s lying about will never come to pass. He’s too uninformed, too unintelligent and far too lacking in curiosity to understand that the jobs he keeps promising his Trumpanzees do not now, and never will, exist. The only place where jobs for the uneducated or the untrained will ever again be created are in the building of infrastructure and even those are shrinking quickly. Trump has done a lot of talking about infrastructure but like everything else he has talked about he just doesn’t know how to make it work. He ran on the ticket of a party that hates the concept of infrastructure simply because it’s too hard for the corporate structure to make a profit out of it. Infrastructure works best when government sponsors it the way it did in the 1930s with the CCP and the WPA. That’s how we built the infrastructure of this country and we could do it again but it would take the national debt and its carrying costs to great, possibly insupportable heights and that makes conservatives curl up in a ball.

But to get back to the problem at hand, Trump by pulling us out of the Paris Accords, much like he did when he pulled us out of the TPP is surrendering our position in the applicable zone to China, the very country he accused of screwing the U.S. in world trade. Is it possible that Trump is so stupid that he doesn’t realize this or has he some undefined agenda to destroy this country? It is common knowledge that some 35% of the voters still think that this clown is somehow functional, somehow good for this country. Whether they recognize it or not, the reality is, after wasting the first 1/12th of his Presidency Donald Trump has wrested the title of worst president in American history from George W. Bush. It took Bush eight years to destroy our economy, kill thousands of our kids in a useless war that he lied us into. Having been given a good head start, Trump will surpass that level of destruction and will leave this nation in smoking ruin by Christmas.