Lonestarblue
Lonestarblue's JournalCanadian company in negotiations with Trump to mine seabed
Evidently not all Canadians hate Trump. Some see an opportunity to work with an administration that guts safety and environmental regulations for the sake of higher profits for already rich people. The company says it can manage environmental rusks—just like BP did in the Gulf of Mexico years ago whose explosion poisoned the water for years.
“A Canadian deep-sea mining firm has revealed it has been negotiating with the Trump administration to bypass a UN treaty and potentially gain authorisation from the US to mine in international waters.
The revelation has stunned environmentalists, who condemned the move as “reckless” and a “slap in the face for multilateralism”.
It comes at a time when calls for a pause in deep-sea mining are intensifying. More than 30 governments are calling for a moratorium, arguing that there is not enough data for exploitation of the seabed to go ahead, and scientists have warned industrial mining could cause irreversible loss of biodiversity.
In a statement on its website on Thursday, Gerard Barron, chief executive of The Metals Company (TMC), said: “We believe we have sufficient knowledge to get started and prove we can manage environmental risks.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/mar/28/deep-sea-mining-international-seabed-authority-canadian-the-metals-company-tmc-negotiations-trump-us
NATIONAL DAY OF ACTION SATURDAY, APRIL 5
I haven’t seen information about this national protest against Trump/Musk posted here yet. The political organization Indivisible is organizing it. Here’s the site where you can find whether there’s an event near you.
https://handsoff2025.com/?SQF_SOURCE=indivisible
There Is a Way for Democrats to Stop Trump and Save America
Thought-provoking article from the NYT by Ben Rhodes, who was Deputy National Security Advisor under Obama. I found this paragraph near the end to reflect a lot of thinking here.
“If you don’t like what is happening to this country, you don’t need to wait for someone to come along and save it: You need each other. That should be the message that Democrats embrace, because most Americans don’t want to go where Donald Trump and Elon Musk are leading us.”
These paragraphs are from the beginning of the article.
“The party has a credibility gap rooted in its initial willingness to support Joe Biden’s decision to run for re-election while warning that the stakes were existential. If that was the case, then why ignore the overwhelming majorities of Americans who believed that he was too old to run, and choose loyalty to a Washington stalwart over the country’s appetite for drastic change?
We are living through the reckoning of defending the status quo.
Yet there is opportunity in this drift: to reimagine what the party stands for, how it will fight its way back and who will lead it. Over the last few weeks, I’ve spoken to some members of the newer generation of Democrats in Congress wrestling with these questions, to the up-and-coming governor of Maryland and to activists who have battled authoritarianism in other countries. Their ideas leave me hopeful that there is a path for America’s political opposition if it casts off a top-down Washington strategy, stale talking points about democracy and the middle class and its own circular firing squads.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/21/opinion/democrats-trump-resistance.html?unlocked_article_code=1.5k4.h7bF.0EGL_cwkMM2G&smid=url-share
The Democratic Party's New Recruiter Has a Theory
I found this article about Democrat Jason Crow to be quite interesting. One of the topics that has come up here about one reason why working class voters may perceive Democrats as elitist is their use of celebrities in their campaigns. But there are many other reasons as well. I think Rep. Crow is correct that Democrats need to reconnect with working-class voters because we have the policies that benefit them, but many don’t believe that Democrats value their lives.
“For Representative Jason Crow of Colorado, a Democrat who may just hold the key to his party winning back the House in 2026, the path to victory starts with understanding how Americans live their lives, down to the most personal details.
“A lot of communities divide the world between when you shower: before work or after work,” he told me, chowing on a burrito at a corner table in Milly’s Community Cafe in Aurora, at the heart of his district outside Denver. Many who shower later — working-class folks living paycheck-to-paycheck — have tuned out Democrats, he said. “They’re not listening to us, because they don’t believe that we respect them and see them.”
He’s not wrong. How the Democratic Party wound up in the political wilderness has myriad answers. But one of the clearest, and, for many Democrats, the most vexing, is that the party became identified as the champion of cultural elites.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/19/opinion/jason-crow-democrats.html?unlocked_article_code=1.5E4.aQyj.d05qM-a4M4Mh&smid=url-share
A Great Unraveling Is Underway
The NYT published this opinion by Thomas Friedman yesterday, and it is an excellent description of Trump and the mess he has made. The analysis is excellent, but no solution to the problem of Trump was offered. One commenter mentioned the 25th Amendment, but there is no way the Project 2025 bunch will support that since Trump is giving them free reign to destroy as much as they can.
Trump’s destruction is deliberate, and Friedman is correct that the country cannot survive four years of this. The only solution I see is to get enough Democrats elected to the House and Senate in 2026 to impeach and convict him. The House is possible. I don’t know about the Senate. What are your thoughts on Democrats actually running to remove Musk and Trump from office?
“And once he won, Trump brought back his old obsessions and grievances — with tariffs and Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky and Canada — and staffed his administration with an extraordinary number of fringe ideologues who met one overriding criterion: loyalty first and always to Trump and his whims over and above the Constitution, traditional values of American foreign policy or basic laws of economics.
The result is what you are seeing today: a crazy cocktail of on-again-off-again tariffs, on-again-off-again assistance for Ukraine, on-again-off-again cuts in government departments and programs both domestic and foreign — conflicting edicts all carried out by cabinet secretaries and staff members who are united by a fear of being tweeted about by Elon Musk or Trump should they deviate from whatever policy line emerged unfiltered in the last five minutes from our Dear Leader’s social media feed.
Four years of this will not work, folks.
Our markets will have a nervous breakdown from uncertainty, our entrepreneurs will have a nervous breakdown, our manufacturers will have a nervous breakdown, our investors — foreign and domestic — will have a nervous breakdown, our allies will have a nervous breakdown and we’re going to give the rest of the world a nervous breakdown.”
Unlicked link
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/11/opinion/trump-economy-tariffs.html?unlocked_article_code=1.3U4.Djys.iCtqj-cDx-Zx&smid=url-share
Europe's powerful tool against Russia? Seizing its frozen assets
Excellent article by economist Joseph Stiglitz. I applaud this idea of using Russia’s frozen assets to help Ukraine. It’s good that a significant portion of them are held in European institutions. Russia violated international law with its invasion of Ukraine. They have forfeited any right to the funds. I especially like President Macron’s statement at the end of the article:
“As Emmanuel Macron recently put it: “Europe should rediscover the taste of risk, of ambition, and of power.” If he and other European leaders want to follow through on their rhetorical support of Ukraine after the Oval Office debacle, they must seize the moment, which means seizing Russia’s assets. Ukraine is defending all of Europe. Europe must not hide behind legalistic excuses.”
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/mar/06/europes-powerful-tool-against-russia-seizing-its-frozen-assets
While our eyes are on the welfare state's destruction, Trump is building a police state
We are watching Trump turn the US into East Germany as Musk fires essential workers but not any worker “necessary to meet law enforcement, border security, national security, immigration enforcement, or public safety responsibilities.” Red states are following his lead. Alabama is trying to prosecute anyone who helps a woman get an abortion in another state. Other states have tried to set up tracking mechanisms to police women’s actions. The East German Stasi relied on snitches to keep people in line. Texas has already created a law for snitches. Other states will follow as they fire workers and hollow out services for citizens so they can spend more money on their police state tactics.
“While we’ve had our eyes on the wrecking ball–Doge pulverizing social services, environmental protection and scientific research, we’ve hardly taken notice of what is being constructed. In the footprint of the already shabby, now half-demolished US welfare state, the Trump administration is building a police state.
In spite of Doge’s cuts to the FBI, the agency’s director, Kash Patel, is gearing up to turn the agency – whose job has always been to spy on US citizens, including enemies of the state as identified by the government in power – into Donald Trump’s personal secret police. At the state level, lawmakers are compiling their own enemies lists and filing bills to reward those who snitch on abortion seekers, transgender people, undocumented immigrants, and school librarians suspected of harboring the wrong books.
The Republican House budget includes $300bn in new funding for defense and border control. Among the Senate budget committee’s announced priorities are finishing the border wall, increasing the number of immigrant detention “beds”, hiring more border patrol agents, and investing in state and local law enforcement to assist in “immigration enforcement and removal efforts”. While no figures are provided in the attached budget, the Senate budget committee assures Americans that any new spending will be offset by reductions.“
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/05/trump-welfare-police-state-government-layoffs
How to lose the 21st century, in three easy steps
An interesting opinion that clearly lays out what Trump is willfully destroying—our future. We all knew that Trump 2.0 would be bad for the country. It’s far worse than I ever thought it could be.
“More than anything else, President Donald Trump loves winning. Yet he has already positioned America to lose the 21st century, in three simple steps:
—Alienate your friends.
—Destroy your business environment.
—Slaughter your golden goose (i.e., science and research).
Trump most vividly demonstrated Step 1 with his Oval Office tantrum against a war-torn ally. But it also includes his gratuitous insults of our friends; abrupt termination of programs tackling global public health menaces (including some that the United States caused); and threats to punish our closest trading partners, with no clear objective.
All that soft power the United States accumulated over the past century is vaporizing. This means no friends to support us against our adversaries, whether rogue nations or terrorist groups. Ticking off our allies also means ticking off some of our best customers, who will turn to economic competitors. In some cases, these customers are outright boycotting U.S. products.”
https://wapo.st/41iUzAW
Here Are the Digital Clues to What Musk Is Really Up To
I found this article really informative—and scary with the ease of Musk having access to our data to essentially trash the government. Musk and his merry band have been given privileged access to roam through almost every government database and cherry pick who to fire—minorities, women, FDA scientists who refused to approve his brain implant, road safety engineers who required better safety for Teslas, and anyone who managed DEI programs. And the wrecking continues, unfettered by any illegality.
“Watching Elon Musk and his band of young acolytes slash their way through the federal government, many observers have struggled to understand how such a small group could do so much damage in so little time.
The mistake is trying to situate Musk solely in the context of politics. He isn’t approaching this challenge like a budget-minded official. He’s approaching it like an engineer, exploiting vulnerabilities that are built into the nation’s technological systems, operating as what cybersecurity experts call an insider threat. We were warned about these vulnerabilities but no one listened, and the consequences — for the United States and the world — will be vast.
Insider threats have been around for a long time: the C.I.A. mole toiling quietly in the Soviet government office, the Boeing engineer who secretly ferried information about the space shuttle program to the Chinese government. Modern digital systems supercharge that threat by consolidating more and more information from many distinct realms.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/21/opinion/musk-doge-personal-data.html?unlocked_article_code=1.yk4.H62l.TL0X6wPKTQzM&smid=url-share
A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently
An interesting article about a potential future Democratic leader with some good ideas. Auchincloss is a Representative from Massachusetts. Here’s the Wikipedia entry about him. We need more people who are willing to think outside the box.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jake_Auchincloss
“Cost disease is the most important economic concept that policymakers are unaware of. Sectors like housing and health care are afflicted by Baumol’s cost disease, which says that because they are very labor-intensive and low productivity, they are going to inflate faster than gross domestic product.
…
Imagine if you were going to build your car. And instead of buying a car at a dealership, you stood in your driveway, called up a general contractor and had them subcontract out the various parts of the car. And people came to your driveway and built the car piece by piece. Imagine how much that car would cost. A lot more than the typical car, right?
Well, that’s how we build houses. And it doesn’t actually have to be that way. And in fact, it is tied to the abundance agenda that I know that you and Derek Thompson and others have been pushing to the front of the policy conversation.
The abundance agenda makes the case that if you’re trying to lower the cost of living for the typical American family, you need to unlock supply rather than subsidize demand. You need to build more stuff.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/18/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-jake-auchincloss.html?unlocked_article_code=1.x04.QeIT.dOjRMzAxKDnh&smid=url-share
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