In his speech to Congress, President Trump kept lying about his tariffs, falsely claiming that Canada is letting huge amounts of fentanyl into our country and suggesting the trade wars will only get worse.
Then press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters directly that if Canada wants to avoid tariffs in the future, it should become the fifty-first U.S. state.
She revealed it: Trump’s tariffs aren’t about fentanyl or any supposed unfair treatment of the U.S. They’re about forcing Canada, with no justification whatsoever, to submit to his will.
Newsflash: It’s not OK for the American president to lie relentlessly about our allies and threaten them with economic Armageddon to bend them to his deranged, passing whims
« [I]n 1994 Ukraine, which had the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world, relinquished its nuclear warheads as part of a complete nuclear disarmament. It did so in exchange for iron-clad security guarantees from the US, UK and Russia. Donald Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine (or, worse, active sabotage by cutting it off from some intelligence sharing) and in-process realignment of the US with Vladimir Putin’s geostrategic objectives guarantees that no state will ever do anything similar in the future. »
In 1994 under an agreement known as the Budapest Memorandum, Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in return for security guarantees. Donald Trump has removed those guarantees. In doing so, Trump has increased the likelihood of nuclear war.
As Hurst explains…
[I]n 1994 Ukraine, which had the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world, relinquished its nuclear warheads as part of a complete nuclear disarmament. It did so in exchange for iron-clad security guarantees from the US, UK and Russia. Donald Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine (or, worse, active sabotage by cutting it off from some intelligence sharing) and in-process realignment of the US with Vladimir Putin’s geostrategic objectives guarantees that no state will ever do anything similar in the future.
Russia would not have attacked Ukraine if the latter had nukes. Because of Trump’s failure to support Ukraine, other countries will try to acquire nuclear weapons because they know they can’t count on American promises and treaty agreements.
Trump has made this a less safe planet in addition to jeopardizing American national security.
“On a freezing cold Wednesday afternoon in eastern Kentucky, Taysha DeVaughan joined a small gathering at the foot of a reclaimed strip mine to celebrate a homecoming. “It’s a return of an ancestor,” DeVaughan said. “It’s a return of a relative.”
That relative was the land they stood on, part of a tract slated for a federal penitentiary that many in the crowd consider another injustice in a region riddled with them. The mine shut down years ago, but the site, near the town of Roxana, still bears the scars of extraction.
DeVaughan, an enrolled member of the Comanche Nation, joined some two dozen people on January 22 to celebrate the Appalachian Rekindling Project buying 63 acres within the prison’s footprint.
“What we’re here to do is to protect her and to give her a voice,” DeVaughan said. “She’s been through mountaintop removal. She’s been blown up, she’s been scraped up, she’s been hurt.”
The Appalachian Rekindling Project, which she helped found last year, wants to rewild the site with bison and native flora and fauna, open it to intertribal gatherings, and, it hopes, stop the prison.
The environmental justice organization worked with a coalition of local nonprofits, including Build Community Not Prisons and the Institute to End Mass Incarceration, to raise $160,000 to buy the plot from a family who owned the land generationally.
Retired truck driver Wayne Whitaker, who owns neighboring land and had considered purchasing it as a hunting ground, told Grist he was supportive. “There’s nothing positive we’ll get out of this prison,” he said.
The penitentiary has been a gleam in the eye of state and local officials and the Bureau of Prisons since 2006. It has always sparked sharp divisions in Roxana and beyond and was killed in 2019 after a series of lawsuits, only to be quietly resurrected in 2022. Last fall, the bureau took the final step in its approval process, clearing the way to begin buying land…
In his book Coal, Cages, Crisis, Schept noted that mine sites are considered ideal locations for prisons or a dumping ground for waste, rather than places of ecological value, as some biologists have argued. The Roxana site has been reclaimed, meaning re-vegetated with a forest that now shelters a number of rare species, including endangered bats.
Opponents argue that a prison will bring more environmental problems than jobs. Letcher County was 1 of 13 counties ravaged by catastrophic flooding in 2022, a situation exacerbated by damage strip mining caused to local watersheds. The prison slated for Roxana will exacerbate the problem.
DeVaughan said the purchase also is a step toward rectifying the dispossession that began with the forced removal and genocide of Indigenous peoples. The Cherokee, Shawnee, and Yuchi made their homes in the area before, during, and after colonization, and their thriving nations raised crops, ran businesses, and hunted bison that once roamed Appalachia.
In all the time since, coal, timber, gas, and landholding companies have at times owned almost half of the land in 80 counties stretching from West Virginia to Alabama. Several prisons sprang from deals made with coal companies, something many locals consider the continuation of this status quo.
Changing that dynamic is a priority for the Appalachian Rekindling Project, which hoped to buy more land to protect it from extractive industries and return its stewardship to Indigenous and local communities. DeVaughn said Indigenous peoples throughout the region will be welcome to use the land as a gathering place…
DeVaughan sees its work establishing a new vision of economic transition for coalfields, one that relies less on “dollars and numbers” and more on “healing and restoration” of the land and the Indigenous and other communities that live there.
She is working with some personal connections in the Cheyenne and Arapaho nations to acquire a herd of bison and plans to work with local volunteers, scientists, and students to inventory the site’s flora and fauna.”
So what happens when this is all developers are building and they run out of people who can afford these things?
So part of it was answered by the article: these aren’t homes to be lived in, there are Homes As Commodities. Investments. They are for the ultra rich to buy and then either hold onto to see if Money Go Up or maybe rent out at stupid high prices.
I had a teacher in grad school, when going for my MBA, who discussed the Bay Area’s housing crisis. People who are living paycheck to paycheck are essentially pushed into flophouses that are illegally being rented to over a dozen people to even afford to be there. Meanwhile rich folks buy up places that sit empty, and try to evade residency-requirements by hiring firms whose whole thing is making homes look lived in (usually associated with various realtors). Also international rich buyers will do this too–American real estate is seen as a VERY safe investment. And you’re probably planning on sending your kids here for college or something so they’ll need somewhere to live, right?
Meanwhile as someone who’s been around areas these things are going up for a few years now…they’re frankly even more absurd in person than the article conveys. A huge yellow house by my parents (it was used as a halfway house for domestic violence victims til someone’s ex showed up with a gun, city sold it off) bulldozed for a home nearly the size of the lot itself, with no obvious design style looking at it. Nowhere for kids to really play, the setback is all slope because they elevated the lot a bit to accommodate a huge basement. No backyard either, all subsumed by the house to get that sweet, sweet square footage. Sticks out like a sore thumb compared to the 80s and 90s homes it shares a street with. It is over 2.5 million, mostly because of the location combined with the square footage.
Meanwhile my parents’ town has a MASSIVE affordable housing shortage and developers have found a sweetheart deal to get out of building any: when building a multi-unit structure (of which the building code requires 10% to be affordable housing that is purchased for a certain amount), every unit that was SUPPOSED to be affordable is allowed not to be if you pay a fine of $100,000 per unit. Which is fucking PEANUTS in an area just outside Arlington where the average home is around $900,000. You get to eliminate nine units that could serve the community instead of the rich for the price of housing ONE family! OBVIOUSLY they’re going to just pay the fine! They’re going to profit more than that on every unit!
Meanwhile the idiot building “luxury” townhomes on their block made the damn things so narrow you can’t open both car doors in the garage (the blueprints were inspected by the city council, who saw nothing wrong with this). In order to fit four more in an already overcrowded space. They’re all going for 1.7 million. At the MOMENT, when they’re not even done being built! It’s madness. We’re gonna have another housing crash eventually but we’re not there yet.
amhrancas 