Observations of an Expat: And So It Begins

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In less than a week Trump has—among other things—announced that he is going to end the right of citizenship for those born in the United States

By Tom Arms

At the end of the first week of Trump 2.0 the world is left shell-shocked trying to find a way through an artillery barrage of presidential decrees.

He promised the decrees. He promised action. He didn’t lie. Not enough people believed him.

In less than a week Trump has—among other things—announced that he is going to end the right of citizenship for those born in the United States; closed America’s southern border and dispatched the army to help guard it.

Because Trump clashed with Anthony Fauci—the man who coordinated America’s response to covid—he has ordered that the websites for the National Institute for Health, Centre for Disease Control and Federal Drug Administration to stop issuing health advisories.

Read: Judge Temporarily Blocks Trump’s Plan to End Birthright Citizenship

Department of Justice lawyers who worked on his prosecution plus the DoJ’s International Division and Criminal Division, are to be sacked and replaced with MAGA loyalists

Federal employees have been told that they will suffer “adverse consequences” if they refuse to turn in colleagues who “defy orders to purge” their departments of diversity, equity and inclusion measures and personnel.

The Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act were signature achievements of the Biden Administration and universally welcomed by the American business community. But they were Biden’s. Trump has scrapped them at the cost of tens of billions of dollars.

Tariffs have yet to be imposed. They are slated to be slapped on Canada and Mexico—at the 25 percent level—from 1 February. On Thursday Trump told the Davos Economic Forum that unless foreign companies moved their businesses to America they would suffer “trillions of dollars in tariffs.”

But perhaps the most disturbing of Trump’s decrees was the 1,500 pardons for the January 6 Capitol Hill riots. Not even his own vice president—JD Vance—thought he would go that far.

The Fraternal Order of Police—America’s largest police union, asked: “What happened to Republican Law and Order? This completely undermines the rule of law and is a stain on Trump’s legacy.”

Stewart Rhodes, leader of the Oath Keepers and one of the more prominent jailed rioters—now freed— disagreed. He said the Capitol Hill police were responsible for the violence and that they should be prosecuted and jailed along the members of the congressional committee that examined the riots; the judges that tried the rioters and the police and the FBI agents who investigated.

Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson appears to agree. He has announced that he will be appointing all the members of a sub-committee to investigate the findings of the first committee. “It is time the American public learned the truth,” he said.

But perhaps the most inexcusable piece of paper that passed Trump’s desk this week was the pardon for Ross Ulbricht. He was sentenced to life imprisonment for operating a dark web net called Silk Road. He was convicted in 2013 of selling hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of illegal drugs, conspiracy to commit computer hacking, money laundering and the sale of fraudulent identity documents. At least six drug overdoses have been directly attributed to Ulbricht’s Silk Road.

American libertarians took up his cause because they support drug legalization. The Libertarian movement backed Trump. But a more important advocate was the bitcoin industry. Ulbricht helped to establish the bitcoin industry which has now become an enthusiastic backer of Donald Trump. The president pushed up Bitcoin values by ordering the Federal Reserve to invest in the cyber coins. Trump himself launched his own bitcoin which has netted him personally more than $50 billion in a week.

Trump said he pardoned Ulbricht “In honour of… the Libertarian Movement which supported me so strongly.” He added that “the scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponisation of government against me.”

World-ReviewWorld Review

A stroke of the pen is not enough to end America’s birth right citizenship laws. Donald Trump Has so many more political and legal mountains to climb before his presidential decree can take effect.

First there is the law. Already 24 Democratic states have launched lawsuits opposing Trump’s sudden end to birth right citizenship.

They are on firm ground. The Fourteenth Amendment of the US constitution says: “All persons born…in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”

Trump claims that birth right citizenship has never challenged in the courts. That is wrong. In the 19th century, fear of the “Yellow Wave” led to the exclusion in 1882 of Chinese immigrants from American shores. In 1898 American-born Wong Kim Ark visited his parents in China. When he returned to America he was refused entry.

Wong’s case went all the way to the Supreme Court. He won. There have been no further challenges in the courts.

Far-right Republican congressmen have since worked to keep the issue alive but their efforts have failed to move beyond the committee stage. Their argument is that those who drafted the 14th Amendment meant to write allegiance rather than jurisdiction. Furthermore that children born in the US of foreign parents are subject to the political allegiance (and jurisdiction) of the country of their parents.

The fact is, however, that the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment wrote what they wrote. We can’t go back and ask them if they meant what they wrote.

So, it would appear, that the legal route is blocked. Although it may not be. There is 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court and a third of the court owe their seats on the bench to Donald Trump.

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India has a severe climate change problem. For a start it is caught between the competing priorities of development, the world’s largest population and a warming planet.

Its economy needs to grow to maintain its population which in 2023 overtook China as the world’s largest.

The easiest way to do that is to continue to rely on antiquated coal-fired power stations which have made India the world’s third worst emitter of Co2 after China and the US.

At the same time, the rapidly warming surface of the world is having an outsized impact on the subcontinent. The country is not only poorer than most, it is also hotter. July to October of 2024 in India saw the highest recorded minimum temperatures since 1901. This in turn led to cyclones and floods as well as droughts.

India’s green technology sector is working overtime to minimize the damage. In the financial year ending March 2025 it will add 35 gigawatts of solar and wind energy to the national power grid. That is roughly enough to power 10 million homes. The plan is to add 500 gigawatts of renewable energy by the end of 2030. The problem is that there are an estimated 250 million homes.

This means that the country is unlikely to reach its target of net zero emissions until 2070. Therefore it must find way to adapt and minimize damage until then.

One adaptive tool is the application of coping mechanisms. More than 100 Indian cities, districts and states have drawn up “heat action plans,” which involve planting trees, opening water kiosks in public spaces and more naturally ventilated buildings with courtyards and fans.

Of at least equal concern is the growing scarcity of water. India has 18 percent of the world’s population but only 4 percent of its fresh water. Last March India’s tech hub of Bangalore nearly ran out of water.

If there is not enough to drink, there is even less to irrigate crops. This has been alleviated somewhat by using recycled waste water which is unfit for human consumption but fine for plants. To Indians it is becoming clear that climate change is here to stay. Political will is lacking, economic pressures are increasing and humans must learn to adapt as well as reduce carbon emissions.

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Donald Trump was not the only American president sworn in this month. Further south Nicolas Maduro started his third term in office. Each administration has been more controversial than the previous one.

Maduro’s inauguration was held in the parliament building ten days before Trump took the oath of office in the Rotunda of the US Capitol. It marked the start of his third term.

Maduro’s first presidential tenure started in March 2013 when his mentor Hugo Chavez unexpectedly died just two months into his fourth term. Chavez was well on his way to becoming the textbook left-wing South American dictator when Maduro picked up the baton. He has been running with it ever since.

His election in 2019 was a total sham. Ditto for 2024. It is almost universally accepted that the real winner of the most recent poll was 75-year-old Edmundo Gonzalez who in turn was acting as a stalking horse for opposition leader Marina Corina Machado whom Maduro banned from running for office. Gonzalez is in exile in Spain and Machado is in hiding somewhere in Venezuela. Both fear for their lives.

Maduro, however, is a past master of ignoring international and domestic public opinion and declaring that black is white and that the Venezuelan people love him. After rigged elections in 2018 the National Assembly declared his election invalid and voted Juan Guaido acting president in 2019. Maduro ignored parliament. Guaido called for mass protests. They quickly fizzled out when Maduro ordered the army onto the streets to suppress them.

In fact, the generals are the real power in Venezuela. They support Maduro because he lavishes them with praise, power and lucrative business contracts. Almost everyone else opposes him, even the lower and middle ranks of the military. In fact, roughly ten percent of Venezuela’s political prisoners are middle-ranking army officers.

Meanwhile the fate of everyday Venezuelans shifts from bad to worse under the staggering weight of economic mismanagement and international sanctions. Massive oil deposits made Venezuela a prosperous country before Hugo Chavez came to power. Per capita income was the equivalent of $8,000 compared to today’s figure of $2,300. Official inflation statistics are currently running at 48 percent—relatively good compared to the 1,700,000 percent a few years ago.

So, what is Trump’s plan for Ukraine? For a start he appears to have abandoned his plan to end the war in 24 hours. The new time is 100 days, according to William Kellogg, Trump’s 80-year-old envoy for the Ukraine War.

Both sides have made noises about a willingness to end the fighting. But it remains to be seen that if those noises will be matched with a political will.

The man tasked with trying to bring Volodomyr Zelensky and Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table is 80-year-old retired general William Kellogg. He has been a Trump supporter since 2016 and was national security adviser to vice president Mike Pence.

Kellogg played a key pro-Trump role in the president’s first impeachment and US-Ukrainian relations. A major part of the impeachment was the assertion that Trump telephoned Zelensky and threatened to withhold US military aid unless he provided damaging information about the Biden family. Kellogg testified that there was “nothing untoward” in the conversation between Trump and Zelensky.

Trump does not forget. He is thus more likely to listen than not listen to General Kellogg’s advice. At the same time, Trump, has one clear objective—no more fighting.

So far that advice appears to be to wave the carrot and stick at both sides and aim for a long-term ceasefire rather than a wholesale peace agreement. The bones of this agreement would be that the frontline is frozen but that Ukraine continues to lay claim to Crimea and the Donbas Region and the fighting stops.

If Zelensky rejects this then Trump will reduce or end US military aid to Ukraine. If Russia rejects the proposal then Trump will increase US military aid and impose additional sanctions on Russia.

The problem is that Putin believes he is winning. He wants more. He wants international recognition for the annexation of Crimea and the Donbas Region, including land not occupied by Russian troops. He also wants the Zelensky government removed from office; a pro-Russian government installed in its place and guarantees that Ukraine not join either the EU or NATO.

That would turn Ukraine into a Russian satellite and spell victory for Putin.

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Tom Arms Journalist Sindh Courier
Tom Arms

Tom Arms is foreign editor of Liberal Democrat Voice. He is also the author of “The Encyclopedia of the Cold War” and “America Made in Britain.”

Read: Observations of an Expat: The Deep State

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