Land Grabs

Thomas Jefferson urged peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, but entangling alliances with none.

Are threats of punitive tariffs and territorial conquest the best ways to achieve that goal? Is Jefferson’s desire one Donald Trump even shares?

Picking Fights

That the US would purchase Greenland and reclaim the Panama Canal was initially perceived as typical Trumpian bluster. But the president seems serious. The World at War Raico, Ralph Check Amazon for Pricing.

Denmark’s claim to its oversized iceberg derives from a few Viking landings more than a millennium ago. Yet there’s little love lost between them and the locals. Particularly after some sinister sterilization projects a couple generations back, the natives would probably prefer the Danes take a hike.

Not that they’d want the US to replace them (Americans shouldn’t want that either). But the US military already has bases on the island (shocking!), so… as with Germany, Britain, and Japan… the Americans essentially already own the place. Making the conquest official would merely convert Greenland into a polar Puerto Rico… a frozen rathole to waste more of our wealth.

The situation in Panama is a bit different. Americans invented the country, carving it from Colombia to create the canal. Having fomented a rebellion and acquired construction rights from the French, the US government paid Panama for territory on either side of the passage.

The Americans held the corridor almost ninety years, till it was transferred to Panama at the turn of the century. Now, apparently, the gringos want it back.

In some sense, that’s reasonable. They created the country, built the canal, maintained it for decades, then gave it away while receiving almost nothing in return.

As with Greenland, Trump may be talking tough to obtain concessions. Like he did last week with Colombia, he’ll probably get some… allowing him to claim “victory” from pushing puny countries around.

A Disgusting Display

Whatever rationale may exist for grabbing Greenland or recapturing the Canal, the most repulsive land grab is underway in the Levant. If nothing else, we know one country on which Trump will never impose a tariff!

This evening, seated beside the Israeli war criminal who’s spent fifteen months ethnically cleansing Gaza, Donald Trump grabbed a sponge.

In a sickening display, he announced that all Palestinians in the strip would need to go. When asked how many people he’s thinking should get out of Gaza, the president replied with his normal nuance:

“all of them….We’re talking probably a million-seven people, maybe a million-eight. But I think all of them. They’ll be resettled in areas where they can live a beautiful life and not be worried about dying every day.”

As a side note, by implying 1.7 – 1.8M Gazans is “all of them”, Trump gives an idea how many Palestinians Israel’s onslaught has killed. More than 2M lived in Gaza before the bombing began.

Is there a way to describe what Trump advocates as anything other than ethnic cleansing? If so, it would be as a real estate deal.

As the president put it, “The US will take over the Gaza Strip. And we will do a job with it too. We’ll own it…” [emphasis added]

If innocent Palestinians should worry about “dying every day” by being in Gaza, why wouldn’t the Americans? Apparently, Mariam Adelson gave Donald Trump millions of reasons.

Some of them enabled him to say something this revolting:

“It would be my hope that we could do something really nice, really good, where they wouldn’t want to return. Why would they want to return? The place has been Hell [he says with the Devil sitting at his side]… nobody could live there….We can build something for them in one of the countries. It could be Jordan, it could be Egypt, it could be one of the other countries… and you build really good quality housing….Someplace they could live and not die. Because Gaza is a place that’ll guarantee they’ll end up dying. The same thing is gonna happen again.”

Yet the man urging people to leave this hellhole wants to own it. Why? The Gulag Archipelago ... Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Best Price: $5.46 Buy New $11.39 (as of 05:20 UTC - Details)

As Trump “lamented” the mortality, the ruler responsible for the killing kept smiling beside him. It was doubtless a grateful grin, because his slaughter couldn’t occur without his American suckers being forced to fund it.

Trump’s son-in-law is fine with that. Jared Kushner already had his sights set on the strip:

“Gaza is a waterfront property and it could be very valuable. It’s a little bit of an unfortunate situation there, but I think from Israel’s perspective I would do my best to move people out and then clean it up.”

This is as astounding and insulting as it is gruesome and galling.

When Trump says “they’ll end up dying” or Kushner quips that “I would do my best to move people out and then clean it up”, those aren’t predictions. They’re threats. This is akin to chasing Kulaks from Ukraine or Cherokee out of Georgia.

And I’m sure it isn’t lost on the president or his son-in-law that an enormous gas field sits off-shore of Gaza. The grift is glaring.

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