Trump’s Demands the Annexation of Greenland on Behalf on US Tech Giants Keen to Exploit Its Minerals

A lot of people have been suggesting that the real reason the Orange Generalissimo wants to get his grubby hands on Greenland is because of its mineral wealth. The argument that he wants it for US national security simply don’t make sense. There’s a video on YouTube of an expert on a British TV interview knocking it down one point after another. First of all, there are already 18 US bases on Greenland. The US has never asked for more, even though the Greenlanders would be perfectly willing to let them. There also aren’t Chinese and Russian ships nosing around Greenland’s waters. There are, however, plenty of Chinese and Russian ships nosing around the American waters off Alaska.

I got this piece yesterday, reproduced from the American radical magazine Jacobin, from the Democrat newsletter Daily Dose of Democracy. It clearly demonstrates that behind Trump’s belligerent demands for Greenland to be handed over to America are the US big tech companies, who have their eyes very firmly set on the precious minerals locked beneath its icecap.

‘The tech billionaires behind Trump’s Greenland push
Lois Parshley, Jacobin: “President Donald Trump started his second term with his sights set on Greenland. When Trump first proposed buying the arctic nation during his first administration, it was treated like a joke. But in a phone call last week with Denmark’s prime minister, who controls the autonomous territory’s foreign policy, the president doubled down on his efforts to seize power. In the ‘aggressive and confrontational’ conversation, Trump threatened tariffs if he didn’t get his way. In a news conference earlier this month, he also refused to rule out the use of military force. Now Denmark is taking him seriously: on Monday, it announced a $2 billion military expansion in the Arctic. Though the island is not for sale, the president emphasizedGreenland’s importance to US national security. Left unspoken: a US takeover could weaken the country’s mining laws and ban on private property, aiding Trump donors’ plans to profit from the island’s mineral deposits and build a libertarian techno-city. The president’s renewed intention to take over Greenland has reignited debates over its sovereignty, as the country grapples with the trade-offs between economic opportunity and independence from Denmark. As the country’s glaciers recede, it’s also facing sweeping climate-driven transformations, threatening traditional industries like fishing and hunting and exposing valuable mineral resources. These shifts have prompted interest from powerful players associated with Trump. Tech moguls in the front row of his inauguration, like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, are also investors in a start-up aiming to mine western Greenland for materials crucial to the artificial intelligence boom. That company, KoBold Metals, uses artificial intelligence to locate and extract rare earth minerals. Their proprietary algorithm parses government-funded geological surveys and other data to locate significant deposits. The program pinpointed southwest Greenland’s rugged coastline, where the company now has a 51 percent stake in the Disko-Nuussuaq project, searching for minerals like copper. Just two weeks before some of its investors were glad-handing at the Capitol celebrations, KoBold Metals raised $537 million in its latest funding round, bringing its valuation to almost $3 billion. Among the contributors was a leading venture capital firm founded by Marc Andreessen, an early Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has helped shape the administration’s technology policies, including consulting with Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency as a self-proclaimed ‘unpaid intern.’ In addition to KoBold, Andreessen has also backed other ventures eyeing the arctic nation: he is a significant investor in Praxis Nation, a project aiming to use Greenland to establish a “crypto state,” a self-governing, experimental community built around libertarian ideals and technology like cryptocurrency. The venture is also funded in part by Pronomos Capital, a venture capital group founded by the grandson of economist Milton Friedman and bankrolled by libertarian figures such as Peter Thiel, whose own family reportedly managed a uranium mine in Namibia. Pronomos aims to create private, business-friendly charter cities like Praxis, often in developing countries where investors could write their own laws and regulations. These ‘broligarchs’” now have the ear of the president. Thiel has been a significant supporter of Trump, throwing millions of dollars behind him throughout his political career and introducing him to current Vice President J. D. Vance.”‘

Jacobin: The Real War on Christmas Is Being Waged by Rich, Scroogelike Bosses

This comes from the radical American magazine Jacobin via Daily Dose of Democracy. I get sent online editions of the latter after signing one of their petitions against the Orange Generalissmo, noting that I wasn’t American but a foreigner, of course. Double Dose of Democracy is very much a Democrat e-newsletter, but it has an emphasis on protecting democracy similar to Open Britain and other pro-democracy movements here in Blighty. In this article, Jacobin’s Liza Featherstone skewers the fearmongering the Right was spewing a few years ago about liberals like the ACLU and so on waging a war against Christmas. She argues instead that there is indeed a real was being fought against the Christmas season, but it’s being waged by very rich, miserly bosses trying to screw every last bit of work from their underpaid staff. Read it for yourself.

‘The real war on Christmas is a class war waged by bosses

Liza Featherstone, Jacobin: “In the right-wing imaginary, the War on Christmas had a good run. Fox News host John Gibson alleged in a 2005 book that liberals were planning to ‘ban the sacred holiday,’ and a moral panic was born, yielding outrage after outrage almost every year. This year, however, the defenders of all things merry and bright have been pretty quiet, and polling shows that even among conservatives and Donald Trump supporters, a declining minority of Americans believe that the beloved holiday is under siege. Sensitive neighbors (and corporations hoping to avoid their ire) may continue to wish us a ‘Happy Holidays,’ the ACLU may continue to object to religious iconography in the town square, yet Americans are ignoring the likes of Tucker Carlson and Bill O’Reilly, instead adulting with a ‘live and let live’ attitude. This rare moment of cultural chill allows us to come together as Americans to confront the real war on Christmas, the one you won’t hear about on Fox News: a class war. If you’ve read Charles Dickens’s 1843 classic A Christmas Carol, you’ll remember that the main character is one of literature’s nastiest bosses. Ebenezer Scrooge hates the holiday and resents giving his employee, Bob Cratchit, even one paid day off with his family, calling Christmas ‘a poor excuse for picking a man’s pocket’ and demanding that the terrified Cratchit be at his desk “all the earlier’ the next day. As bad as that sounds, poor Bob Cratchit had it easier than many American workers today. A recent survey of over one thousand workers found that one in ten were working on Christmas Day. Nearly one in four expected to be working on Christmas Eve, while more expected to work on New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day. Reasons included needing the money and lacking paid time off. Dickens, like his contemporary, Karl Marx, made observations about capitalism and its abuses to the human spirit that remain all too relevant today; in this case, his point was that bosses don’t stop acting like bosses at the holidays. Today, layoffs at this time of year are common. Last week, billionaire Elon Musk, who has been elected to exactly no government office but suddenly seems to be running everything, was apparently seeking to outdo Scrooge by trying to force a government shutdown, which would have meant that active-duty soldiers and other government workers wouldn’t get their paychecks. For some workers, conditions on the job get even worse at Christmastime. One of the reasons Americans give for working during the holiday is the fact that it is an especially busy time of year for their company or industry. As Teamsters went on strike at seven Amazon warehouses — in New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, Atlanta, and Southern California — some workers have observed that they were barely seeing their loved ones this season, considered ‘peak’ for the company. ‘When you think of the holidays you think of spending time with your family, you think of reconnecting,’ a packer in Staten Island told Labor Notes, ‘And during peak, all you can think of is sleep.’ Even for those who don’t have to slave away in an Amazon warehouse, exploitation gets in the way of Christmas. Many people don’t get paid enough to enjoy travel and gift-giving. In fact, financial stress during the holiday season is so common that articles advising us how to manage it are published every year. Dickens was smart enough about class relations under capitalism to know that Scrooge’s transformation wouldn’t have been realistic without an extraordinary plot twist. Scrooge needs an intervention — by ghosts. Dickens knew that getting capitalists to behave humanely, at Christmas or at any time of year, would require a departure from the realism he employs in many of his other novels.”

TYT’s Nomiki Konst Talks to Radical Journos about Rise of Socialist Ideas in Britain and America

I’m really delighted that the American progressive news service, The Young Turks, sent their girl Nomiki Konst over here to cover the Labour party conference. In this clip Konst talks to the Guardian journalist, Abi Wilkinson, and Bhaskar Sunkara, the founder and editor of the Jacobin magazine. With the election of Jeremy Corbyn, membership of the Labour part has exploded. In America there’s been a similar rise in people joining the DSA – the Democratic Socialists of America.

The programme explains how the DSA only dates from the 1970s, while the Labour party over here in Britain dates from the beginning of the last century. However, as Wilkinson explains, the party drifted to the right under Tony Blair’s New Labour, which made it much less Socialist, dropping Clause 4, the part of the Constitution which demanded the nationalisation of the means of production. She states that membership of the Labour party started to grow again after Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader, despite no-one expecting him to win. Corbyn followed ‘Red’ Ed Miliband, who she says was personally more left-wing than his policy platform. But he was told that you couldn’t win on a left-wing platform. In America, Socialist ideas have become far more popular thanks to Bernie Sanders in the Democrat party, just like Corbyn over here has popularised them in Labour.

Konst raises the issue of whether left-wing policies, like the NHS and a welfare safety net, are more acceptable here than in America. She feels they are, but Wilkinson states that if the NHS was set up now, there’d be much more opposition to it, with demands for means testing and debates about whether it was affordable. She states that it was in the 1940s that the great ideas for massive reform and big programmes became acceptable.

Konst then turns to Sunkara. Sunkara states that when he founded Jacobin, after the French revolutionary party, the number of socialists he knew were only about a thousand. Now their readership is up to 40,000. He and his friends founded the magazine, despite the small size of its prospective readership, because they found socialist ideas so powerful. He also says that, as far as the writing style for the magazine went, he wanted it to be written in an accessible style like Conservative mags like the Economist. He states that you can read the Economist without knowing or having read anything by Adam Smith. So he wants ordinary working people to be able to read Jacobin without having read anything by Marx. He feels that this is important, as many left-wing magazines and publications he feels talk down to their less educated readers from the working class.

He states that he is somewhat concerned about whether or not the growth of his readership represents a genuine increase in the number of people turning to socialism in America, or whether it just means that they’re reaching more of that niche, in a market that is heavily personalised.

The three talk briefly about the relationship between left-wing parties and the trade unions. Wilkinson states that the Labour party has always had strong links with the unions, and asks if it isn’t true that the Democrats have also had trade union funding, to get a negative or non-committal answer from Konst. She also states how the Scum and the other right-wing papers have tried to break the power of the unions by working up resentment and jealousy against them through publishing the salaries of trade union officials and commenting on how much larger they are than ordinary salaries.

As for the reasons for the growth in Labour party membership and the turn to the Left, Wilkinson states that it’s because of the poverty generated by the past decades of free market policies. This is not only affecting the working class, but also other parts of the population, so that 75 per cent of young people vote or support Labour.

The three also discuss the problems in magazine publishing caused by the decline of the press. Within three years of the crash in America, 800 newspapers had folded, and even the big national newspapers were feeling the pinch. The result of this has been a press that is aimed at the lowest common reader, and entire news networks have been built on this, like Fox News. Thus, Americans were deprived of news at the local level, which would have informed them how bad the political situation really was. Like the Democrats had lost 1,000 seats, and the Koch brothers were engaged in a massive funding campaign at the local level to push through extreme right-wing policies.

In Britain the majority of the press is right-wing, including the Scum, whose readers regard themselves as working class. Konst asks Sunkara whether he has any politicos reading his magazine. He says they’ve a few local senators, and one or two at a national level. Wilkinson states that the Morning Star, a Socialist paper well to the left of the Guardian or Independent, held a fringe event at the Labour conference. Speakers at this event included Diane Abbott, Richard Burgon and another member of the Shadow Cabinet.

This is a very optimistic interview, and I hope this optimism is born out by a Labour victory over here, and the takeover of the Democrat party by progressives and their victory over the Republicans at the next presidential election.

Go Bernie!
Go Jeremy!
And go the working men and women of America and Britain!