Trump's Racism Caused Him To Push To Sell Puerto Rico

Puerto Rico is 5,328 square miles with a population of 3.2 million (Americans). Greenland is melting but the area is 836,300 square miles with around 56,000 people, less than the 70,000 who live in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico's 7th largest city. Greenland's biggest town, Nuuk, has 18,000 people. There are 140 Americans station in Greenland at the Thule Air Base.

Former Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor is getting really famous. The video above is an interview he did with Hallie Jackson on MSNBC yesterday. It's worth watching the whole thing but at the 5:15 point he said "One time before we went down, [Trump] told us, not only did he want to purchase Greenland, he actually said he wanted to see if we could sell Puerto Rico, could we swap Puerto Rico for Greenland, because, in his words, Puerto Rico was dirty and the people were poor."

Taylor said Trump wasn't joking. He said that Trump "expressed deep animus towards the Puerto Rican people behind scenes. These are people who were recovering from the worst disaster of their lifetime. He is their president. He should be standing by them, not trying to sell them off to a foreign country."

Alan Grayson, who grew up in the Bronx, in an area that has more Puerto Ricans than anyplace else in the continental U.S. and then went on to represent the Orlando area, which has one of the continental U.S.' biggest Puerto Rican populations said he feel "the feeling is mutual. I’m sure that Puerto Ricans would love to trade Donald Trump for the Queen of England, Pope Francis, or even Muammar Qaddafi’s corpse. To say that Donald Trump is a racist is like saying that Serena Williams is a tennis player."

I think anyone who knows anything about Trump from his pre-White House days, knows he's always been a bigot with an animus towards Puerto Ricans, especially working class Puerto Ricans. The first time the young Trump made it into the legitimate newspapers was as the result of the federal government suing him and his father for illegally discriminating against Puerto Rican families in a building development they used federal funds to develop. That's around the time Woody Guthrie, one other tenants in Brooklyn rode this song about Trump, Sr.





Progressive Jared West is the official Democratic candidate running to replace Trumpist Sam Killebrew in the Winter Haven-Haines City-Davenport area of Polk County (HD-41). He wasn't happy about hearing what Trump said about Puerto Ricans. "It is absolutely deplorable Trump said that," he told me this morning, "but are we really surprised? Puerto Rico has been through a lot lately, and he’s done nothing but mock them and ignore them. Puerto Rican people are Americans, and my district has one of the highest concentrations of Puerto Rican’s in Florida. Many of them came over after the natural disasters. Today, when I’m elected, and forever, I stand with all people and especially Puerto Ricans to denounce this awful hate filled rhetoric. We will see you in November Donald Trump, and you will be answering for these comments."

Bob Lynch is the Democratic Party candidate for the Miami-Dade state House seat held by GOP wig wig Daniel Perez, a knee-jerk Trumpist, with no interest in working families other than during election season. Lynch has a very different perspective. This morning he told me that "It is unclear why Miles seems surprised as to the extent of Trump’s depravity and lack of humanity. He willingly went to work for a man that announced his presidency by declaring our Latino neighbors to be rapists, thugs, and killers. We have people that are still living without electricity and running water in Puerto Rico because of the agency Miles continued to work for, despite his shamelessly self-serving newfound conscience. Trump, Kitstjen Nielsen, and Miles Taylor are all personally responsible for thousands of needless deaths in Puerto Rico as well as thousands of Latino families destroyed after being separated by ICE. Miles should have resigned and immediately gone to Congress the day it was proposed to keep children in cages. Congress should also haul him, Nielsen, and everyone else who committed crimes against humanity at Trump’s behest in for non-stop hearings between now and November. A redemption tour because he sees grifters like the Lincoln Project getting rich is not something the media should be feeding into. Donald Trump doesn’t consider Puerto Rican’s to be Americans nor does he believe other Latinos should be given basic human rights. Miles Taylor could have done something to stop it and chose to do nothing. November is way too late for his victims."

Here's the version of the same Woody Guthrie song, the one I've been listening to for the last few years-- and performed by Ryan Harvey, Ani DeFranco and Tom Morello:

Still Looking For A Legacy Beyond "The Worst President In History," Trump Wants To Buy Greenland

With the glaciers melting, maybe Fatty envisions opening a golf resort

Trump seems to be catching on that a Great Wall of China along the southern border, viewable from space, is not going to be his legacy, so... reported the Wall Street Journal's Vivian Salama Thursday, he decided to try for an Alaska-type acquisition for his shaky legacy-- or a modern day Louisiana Purchase. "Trump," she wrote, "made his name on the world’s most famous island. Now he wants to buy the world’s biggest. The idea of the U.S. purchasing Greenland has captured the former real-estate developer’s imagination, according to people familiar with the deliberations, who said Mr. Trump has, with varying degrees of seriousness, repeatedly expressed interest in buying the ice-covered autonomous Danish territory between the North Atlantic and Arctic oceans. In meetings, at dinners and in passing conversations, Mr. Trump has asked advisers whether the U.S. can acquire Greenland, listened with interest when they discuss its abundant resources and geopolitical importance and, according to two of the people, has asked his White House counsel to look into the idea." The U.S. tried, unsuccessfully, to buy Greenland in 1867 and then again in 1946, when Truman offered the Danes 100 million for it.

Some of his advisers have supported the concept, saying it was a good economic play, two of the people said, while others dismissed it as a fleeting fascination that will never come to fruition. It is also unclear how the U.S. would go about acquiring Greenland even if the effort were serious.

With a population of about 56,000, Greenland is a self-ruling part of the Kingdom of Denmark, and while its government decides on most domestic matters, foreign and security policy is handled by Copenhagen. Mr. Trump is scheduled to make his first visit to Denmark early next month, although the visit is unrelated, these people said.

U.S. officials view Greenland as important to American national-security interests. A decades-old defense treaty between Denmark and the U.S. gives the U.S. military virtually unlimited rights in Greenland at America’s northernmost base, Thule Air Base. Located 750 miles north of the Arctic Circle, it includes a radar station that is part of a U.S. ballistic missile early-warning system. The base is also used by the U.S. Air Force Space Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command.

The U.S. has sought to derail Chinese efforts to gain an economic foothold in Greenland. The Pentagon worked successfully in 2018 to block China from financing three airports on the island.

...Though it has vast natural resources across its 811,000 square miles, Greenland relies on $591 million of subsidies from Denmark annually, which make up about 60% of its annual budget, according to U.S. and Danish government statistics.

On Thursday, when the news broke in the U.S., everyone in Denmark was fast asleep. When they woke up this morning, Danish politicians heaped scorn on the idea. Even the right-wing People's Party, which is aligned with Trump's brand of fascism, was openly disdainful. Their foreign affairs spokesman, Soren Espersen, said in a radio interview earlier today that "If it is true that he has those thoughts, then it is definitive proof that he has gone crazy. I must say it as it is: The idea that Denmark should sell 50,000 citizens to the United States is completely insane." According to Reuters, Danish politicians poured scorn on the idea. Former prime minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen: "It must be an April Fool’s joke... but totally out of season."

Politicians in Greenland were equally contemptuous of the idea. Aaja Chemnitz Larsen, a member of the Danish Parliament from Greenland: "I am sure a majority in Greenland believes it is better to have a relation to Denmark than the United States, in the long term. My immediate thought is 'No, thank you.'"

Rufus Gifford was the U.S. ambassador to Denmark while Obama was president. (Trump has replaced him with Carla Sands, big-time GOP campaign contributor and Trump bundler, a prominent California real estate agent, former actress (The Bold And The Beautiful and The Deathstalkers and the Warriors From Hell) and chiropractor, who holds a degree from Life Chiropractic College in a Hayward, California.) Ambassador Gifford-- though not Carla-- was active on Twitter yesterday:

What Did Lamar Smith Learn On His Taxpayer-Funded Trip To Greenland?

Texas Congressman Lamar Smith is a joke. NO, I don't mean he's a joke the way most of the Texas GOP delegation is a joke. Smith is a very special joke. When the House GOP leadership decided to make Lamar Smith chairman of the House Science Committee, it was a big yuck all over Capitol Hill. Smith is a crackpot Christian Scientist who doesn't believe in Science itself-- nor in the whole concept of "facts." The committee dates back to 1959 when it was established as the House Committee on Science and Astronautics. The committee's heyday was under a mainstream and conscientious Republican, Sherwood Boehlert of New York. But soon after, it used to be a joke to Boehner and Cantor that they had another Texas non-Science believer, ancient and very, very senile Ralph Hall, as the chairman. When he couldn't keep his bodily functions in check any longer they decided to go with Lamar who they were sure would be just as entertaining. And if you don't like Lamar, they always laugh, #2 on the committee is another fringe lunatic-- albeit a stoned one-- Dana Rohrabacher. Other anti-science circus performers thrown onto the committee include Frank Lucas (R-OK), Mo Brooks (R-TX), Bill Posey (R-FL), Jim Bridenstine (R-OK), Randy Weber (R-TX), Steve Knight (R-CA), Brian Babin (R-TX), Gary Palmer (R-AL), Barry Loudermilk (R-GA) and crazy old Daniel Webster (R-FL). But Lamar is the chief in the Republican Party's War on Science.

Last week we found out that Lamar Smith had a fabulous-- and secret-- adventure to Greenland last May. He and a delegation including a bunch of other climate change deniers from his committee, plus 3 Democrats, went to the Arctic to see the impact of climate change first hand.

It had the potential to be an awkward or even hostile visit. As chair of the science committee for the past four years, Rep. Smith of Texas has waged a public war with federal climate scientists, or “so-called self-professed climate scientists,” as he called them in March. He’s challenged their research and integrity, repeatedly subpoenaed their emails, and voted to gut their funding.

Billed as an oversight visit for the science committee, the May 8–14 trip included a series of closed-door sessions for the politicians to inspect facilities and learn about federally funded science conducted at research hot spots in the Arctic Circle, as well as social events for the lawmakers and their families. No one publicized the visit, and some scientists told BuzzFeed News they were instructed not to talk about it.

In this part of the world, the realities of climate change are hard to ignore. On an aerial tour of Greenland, for example, the lawmakers saw the retreating “sugar top” ice cap and connecting glaciers. Scientists told them about how warmer temperatures had even changed the local insect populations.

“They were pretty clear that 10 years ago they didn’t have mosquitoes in the summer and now they do,” said Rep. Jerry McNerney, a Democrat who joined the committee because he wanted to take action on climate, and who accompanied Smith to the Arctic. “There was some real direct, you know, concrete evidence that things are changing.”

...Smith wasn’t the only one who has voiced doubts about climate change or responding to the threat: Lucas, for example, has questioned whether carbon dioxide is a pollutant, and Babin applauded President Trump’s decision to withdraw the US from the Paris climate agreement. [Mark] Sanford, though, was one of 17 Republicans who introduced a resolution in March to come up with "economically viable" climate change solutions.

...The first stop was the northernmost US city, Alaska’s Utqiagvik (formerly called Barrow). The people who live there face multiple climate threats, such as flooding from rising seas and infrastructure failures linked to the thawing of frozen ground.

At the Barrow Arctic Research Center, the group learned about microbial life in extreme conditions such as sea ice. And at the tribal community college Ilisagvik College, the lawmakers heard presentations on NSF-funded studies of indigenous languages and the effects of a warming climate on Arctic microbes.

“I was less than a month into my job role (Executive Director of Institutional Advancement) and a bit nervous,” Justina Wilhelm from Ilisagvik College wrote in an email. “Overall the visit was positive and I am grateful to have had the opportunity to provide a tour to the NSF congressional delegation.”

The next day, at the Barrow Atmospheric Baseline Observatory, the group learned about how scientists monitor the levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the air, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration spokesperson confirmed.

The second half of the trip was spent hopping between US-run facilities in Greenland. The group arrived at the Thule Air Base, in western Greenland, on May 11. That evening they dined in semiformal wear with researchers at the base’s “Top of the World” officers’ club, according to two researchers who were in attendance.

Nimesh Patel, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said he got a heads-up about the visit a week before. He was already going to Greenland for a conference, and scrambled to coordinate flights to get to the remote base after. In Thule, he gave the delegation a tour of a massive telescope under construction.

“I was left with the feeling that they were really interested in the science,” Patel said. This confused him a bit, he added, given the committee’s history of being “not genuinely very supportive, it seems, of science, particularly Lamar Smith.”

Derrick Crowe is the progressive alternative to Smith in the central Texas district stretching from the UT campus in Austin through the Hill Country, San Marcos and New Braunfels and as far south as the South Texas Medical Center and Government Hill in San Antonio. Crowe hopes to build on the progress Tom Wakely made in his heroic challenge to Smith last cycle. Wakely announced today that he's running for governor. ("Today," he said in a statement, "I enter the Texas Governor’s race on the heels of Gov. Abbott’s attacks on labor, on women, on refugees and immigrants, on Hispanics and other minorities, on the LBGTQ community, on the poor in our state, on our environment and on our great cities. His attacks on our fellow Texans need to be responded to with the most forceful weapon we have at our disposal - the ballot box." Meanwhile Crowe is a quick learner when it comes to all things Lamar. "Unfortunately any trip Lamar Smith takes to a site to discuss federal climate research is likely a pretext for an effort to cut federal efforts to mitigate climate disaster. Smith has led the charge to deceive the public about the oncoming climate crisis and his political donors' culpability for it. He has a lot to answer for, and no publicity stunt can change that."

The Greenland Ice Sheet Is Melting 600% Faster Than Any Model Predicted

Not the Uber ride to the future we were expecting...

by Gaius Publius

But at my back I always hear
Time's wingéd chariot hurrying near
–Andrew Marvell

Almost everyone I know is complacent about global warming. That is, they almost all know that it's a problem, that it's coming, and that it will be a big problem "sometime in the future." But that time in the future is about as distant as the time when a new-to-smoking teenager thinks she will come down with lung cancer. It's far enough in the future to equate to "never," or its closest approximation in emotional terms.

I've been consistently contending, however, in these pages and elsewhere, that things are now different, that (using our metaphor) our teenager will not reach her mid-twenties before she's sick, panicked and regretting her decision. She may not even see her twenties at all before passing away. Imagine, for example, that based on an examination of our teenager on the day she lit her first cigarette, her doctor discovered that because of her genetic makeup, her stage 4 diagnosis may be just a few short years away — perhaps five, perhaps ten, no more than ten to be sure.

Now imagine that he told her this, on that first-cigarette day. Would such a discovery change her behavior? It would certainly change mine. "Five years, ten at most" is time I can understand.

I believe this is the situation we're now in with respect to global warming.

We Don't Have "Forever" to Fix This

Almost everyone promising to address climate change does so on timelines that equate to "never," on timelines that imply that we have more than a generation — the emotional equivalent of "forever" — to fix the problem.

President Obama, for example, wanted to reduce emissions by moving to "20 percent of electricity from renewable sources by 2030." Hillary Clinton was comfortable addressing climate change by reducing CO2 and other greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions 33% by 2030.

For context, here's the EPA's analysis of the sources of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by sector:

Greenhouse gas emissions by sector (source: EPA)

From this information, three things are clear:

   1. 2030 — nearly a generation away — is the emotional equivalent of "never" for anyone 50 years of age or older.

   2. Even if Obama's or Clinton's target — not for emissions, just for power generation — were achieved, how would it bring down emissions from any other sources, such as from agriculture and transportation?

   3. Which means that prior to this election, the nation's real plan was to wait until the 2050s, 2060s or later to achieve meaningful reductions (i.e., greater than 50%) in total emissions. Again, that's the emotional equivalent of "never" for any American adult living today.

And yet, "Time's wingéd chariot" is not called "wingéd" for nothing. What if the deadline for meaningful emissions reduction is almost here? What if the planet needs us to stop emissions in something like ten years, or risk losing completely its suitability for large-scale human habitation?

What if, in the next ten years, we actually watched — not imagined; witnessed — that suitability start to disappear before our eyes? Would facing that real possibility today change our behavior tomorrow? I would have to think yes, if enough people did it.

What if our last chance to meaningfully act is now? I'm asking everyone reading this — including all of our Beltway readers — to consider this question seriously. There are ways to defeat Trump's march to stage 4 climate chaos — truly there are — but not if no one wants to do it. Not if people think they can safely can hand off the consequences to the next generation.

Things are moving with surprising speed on the climate front. This generation is handing off the consequences ... to itself.

The Looming Death of the Greenland Ice Sheet

Now the news. The Greenland ice sheet is disappearing 600% faster than any model predicted. This adds to all of the other indications that global warming and its consequences are arriving consistently and surprisingly fast, that everyone making timelines for global warming should be expected to be, by default, "wrong to the slow side."

The following information comes from an interview with climate scientist David Barber on the Real News Network (h/t Naked Capitalism). The interview is below:

A few takeaways from the interview plus my comments. The full interview, however, is not that long and there's a transcript at the link.

First, from the start of the interview, why is global warming happening so much faster in the Arctic? (Emphasis is mine throughout.)

DIMITRI LASCARIS: I’d like to begin by asking you to describe for us, in general terms, the effect that the planet’s warming is having now on Arctic sea ice.

DAVID BARBER: Well, a good way to think about it is the planet, as a whole, as it changes temperature, as it increases in temperature, it has a disproportionate effect as a function of latitude of the planet. We’ve increased by about 1 degree Celsius globally across the entire planet [depending on what you count as the "zero" mark]. But in the Arctic, we’ve increased, on average, two to three times that, relative to the rest of the planet.

And the reason for that is, the Arctic is an ocean covered by sea ice, and that sea ice is white. So, when you have solar insulation on the surface, it reflects that energy from the sun back to space when the white cover is there; when there is no white cover there, it’s a dark ocean and it absorbs that energy from the sun into the ocean. You then have to get rid of all that energy for sea ice to form in the fall, and that is one of the main reasons why we’re seeing an amplification of this global warming signal in the Arctic.

And now from near the end, the news about the Greenland ice sheet:

DIMITRI LASCARIS: ... If the global community satisfies its current emission reduction targets [per the Paris climate agreement], but does not exceed them, what kind of sea level rise do you think we will experience in this century?

DAVID BARBER: Well, first of all, I’m not a specialist in sea level rise, so I’m a little bit uncomfortable with giving you numbers. I’d rather talk more about the implications of this. What we’re seeing in the Arctic with the current situation, is that the cryosphere — so those portions of the earth’s system that are frozen, so lake ice, sea ice, glacial ice –- all of them are being affected. They’re all melting.

The Greenland ice sheet, we’re losing mass from it about 600% faster than what we expected. And of course, it’s the glacial ice masses that are really causing the sea level rise issue to be such an issue.

DIMITRI LASCARIS: … you said 600% more than what you expected. Do you mean, what you expected taking into account warming trends resulting from the introduction of CO2 into the atmosphere? Or, are you talking about historical melting, before the fossil fuels era?

DAVID BARBER: [...]. I think the quote that I’m thinking of, is 600% faster than what current models project. That’s based on greenhouse gas effects on the Greenland ice sheet. So, the situation is a serious one. Now, we also used to think that the Greenland ice sheet, and the ice sheets in the Antarctic, for instance, were a much slower process to lose mass to the ocean. We’re finding that they actually lose mass quite quickly, when you have ice shelves in particular, where these glacial features grow out over an ocean.

Destruction of the Greenland ice sheet six times faster than any model predicts is truly "Times wingéd chariot." We could easily see ice-free summers in the Arctic in the next five to ten years. And at the rate the Greenland ice sheet is disappearing, we could see a much colder Europe not long after that.

A Much Colder Europe

And a second point. Near the middle of the interview they discuss what this mass of fresh water from the Greenland ice melt will do to the weather of Europe, since Europe is unnaturally warm for its latitude. (London, for example, is about the same north latitude as Calgary. Paris is about the same north latitude as Winnipeg.)

The reason for Europe's relative warmth is very simple — the Gulf Stream.

From an animation showing the Gulf Stream's surface path only, the flow of dense salty water north; the return path of that same salty water is near the ocean floor (source)

Because the Gulf Stream is a "river" of very dense, very salty water, it is easily "shut off" by the introduction of a mass of much-less-dense fresh water. Look again at the position of the Greenland ice sheet (red mass near the top) relative to the Gulf Stream. There is evidence of a much colder Europe several times in the paleoclimate record thanks to a disrupted Gulf Stream.

Here's just a bit of that part of the discussion:

DIMITRI LASCARIS: It’s my understanding that at one point in the fairly distant past, after the melting of massive levels of ice in North America, there was a dramatic cooling in Europe as a result of a change in the temperature of the flow of waters in the northern Atlantic.

Is that a scenario, that kind of scenario, one with respect to which there’s a significant risk of a recurrence? That something along the lines of, for example, the melting of the Greenland ice sheet could have a dramatic effect on the climate in Europe, or other parts of the Northern Hemisphere?

DAVID BARBER: Yeah. What you’re speaking of is what happens with meridional overturning in the North Atlantic. This is the way that deep water is formed on our planet’s oceans. And sea ice plays a very important role in that overall process of how ocean energy is circulated around the planet.

Now, historically, we’ve always felt that the amount of fresh water that you introduce to the North Atlantic had to be a very large amount of fresh water, for you to be able to slow down this overturning of this North Atlantic circulation. And of course, that fresh water historically has done that. And there is evidence from a paleoclimate record.

Paleoclimate records are when we go back and study different proxies of how the climate is changing. We can see, very dramatically, shifts, and very dramatic changes, based on the historical evidence in the Greenland ice sheet, for example. But also from other ice sheets around the planet, that there have been occurrences in the past where very significant, and relatively rapid changes have happened to our climate system. So, as climate scientists, we’re very concerned about that because it basically tells us that our planet is capable of shifting to another stable state relatively rapidly....

I think the take-home message for the public is that, we should not be experimenting with releasing very large amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere more quickly than anything our planet has seen before in its historical past, because the climate is very capable of changing to another stable state and, of course, that’s not a good thing for us as a human species.

The displacement of people due to climate is a very big concern for us, because there are so many of us on the planet. And we don’t have a whole lot of, just sort of free room, to go and move to, once we have a climate problem in one part of the planet.

For a sense of what "displacement of people due to climate" actually means, see this — "Climate Change in the Age of Trump: A 'Humanitarian Crisis of Epic Proportions'".

Finally, imagine a Europe in the midst of two refugee crises, not just one — a crisis in which people fleeing drought and war flood north from the Middle East (as is happening now), and a Europe cooling rapidly enough to cause people with the means to get out to do so.

Again, we may see such conditions, or conditions presaging them, long before the 2030s. Do we want to though? Because if we do get to that point, the point where the "writing is on the wall" for people not freaked out today, the force of change will then be fully upon us, and chaotic humanity is likely to make orderly adaptation dramatically less possible.

Is it an emergency yet? Tick tick tick.

GP