Trump admin seizes US$120,000,000 owned by the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board as stake in an offshore wind project, demands that it be invested in fossil fuel development instead.
Why is the Canada Pension Plan investing in projects to improve the US in the first place? We should be improving our own lives and infrastructure.
https://www.cppinvestments.com/the-fund/how-we-invest/
Geographic diversification is the stated reason. At least it’s green infrastructure. Hopefully they take the project somewhere better.
Because traditionally, wealthy Canadians don’t invest in the rest of Canada, they invest in Britain, the US or the EU. Canada doesn’t grow very fast so value grows slowly. Of course, the reason Canada doesn’t grow very fast is Canadians don’t invest in Canada. Kinda one of those “vicious cycle” things.
The Canada Pension Fund is NOT for rich people to use. It’s mandated by the government to make sure that the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) funding for retired and disabled Canadians is adequate for our needs.
Why is the vast majority of our PM’s investments in the USA?
Mark Carney has investments in 567 organizations. Only three are Canadian
Because Carney was always a fiscal conservative piece of shit. Not a literal Nazi piece of shit like Poilievre but not far off.
exactly
Here’s an idea…pull all investments from US infrastructure projects and invest that money in Canada instead. Fuck the US, and fuck Trump in particular.
WTF, we are going to fight this right Carney?
This is just another sign that we should work to distance ourselves as much as we can from them
We will for sure be expressing concern and alarm. Possibly even trepidation!
Time to gather NATO and drop those US bonds!
NATO is fundamentally a US driven project. There is no NATO without the US.
Call it what you want, but the US is still deep in the FA stage.
Eventually things will shift to the FO phase.
With their national debt being carried by the countries they continually seem to want to ridicule, alienate and bully, eventually something has to give.
Trump seems hell bent on torching the US from the inside out, and it’s working.
Sure, eventually the empire is going to unravel, and it looks like that unravelling is happening an accelerating pace now. That said, Trump is himself a product of the failing system. People like him have always been around, but it’s the declining material conditions in the US that allowed opportunists to get into positions of power. The direction of travel will be exactly the same when Trump is gone.
I wonder if they break-up and reform as a nom-US version, if their logo will continue to be reminiscent of the swastika?
lol yeah, it’s not too subtle
That’s what the US thinks, but it isn’t true. NATO would definitely not be as strong…but to abandon the alliance altogether just because the US pulls out, would be suicide for most of Eastern Europe and the Nordic States.
That’s not what the US thinks, that’s what material reality tells us. The US accounts for the vast majority of critical and high-end weapons systems such as missiles, stealth fighters, and strategic systems. Approximately 80-90% are US made https://agendapublica.es/noticia/20845/javier-colomina-nato-european-war-such-as-one-ukraine-90-of-missiles-used-come-united-states
For conventional weapons like like artillery shells or tanks Europe does produce some https://en.defence-ua.com/analysis/1_trillion_10_years_europes_long_road_to_military_independence_from_the_us_hidden_challenges-17291.html
However, all western countries are entirely dependent on US satellites and have no immediate alternative without the US. The Americans also do pretty much all the coordination and planning in NATO. If they left, the alliance might hobble along, but it would be a shadow of its former self.
Also, as Ukraine and Iran show, NATO military doctrine is now obsolete:
A single team of some 10 Ukrainians, acting as the adversary, counterattacked the NATO forces. In about half a day they mock-destroyed 17 armored vehicles and conducted 30 “strikes” on other targets.
You seem to be operating on the false assumption that the US would suddenly stop selling weapons to Europe if they chose to leave NATO. That’s almost as absurd as saying Russia would refuse to sell oil and gas to Europe over their support for Ukraine.
Besides, none of that has anything to do with whether or not NATO would still exist if the US did leave. There would obviously be a scramble to realign logistical infrastructure, but the rest of NATO is more than capable of doing that. It’s not like EU countries don’t have the capability to expand their own industries…they just haven’t had the incentive.
But, the point I was actually disputing was whether or not NATO would survive a US withdrawal…and as I said, it would have to. If the US pulled out, it would be suicide for the remaining countries to try and “go it alone”. If anything NATO would become even more important than ever, if the US left.
Also not sure what significance that last article has to this topic, given the fact that the US was also a part of those drills. That’s just a testament to the effectiveness of Ukraine’s forces, as well as an acknowledgement that modern drone warfare is changing the way battlefield tactics need to be structured. Not to mention it’s always been the case that seasoned forces that are currently engaged in real combat are going to have a huge advantage over forces that aren’t, no matter what kind of training they’ve received.
The US actually needs to produce weapons to sell them. Just go look at stuff like missile production rates. The US ran through more than half its stocks in the war on Iran in just a couple of months. They need to replenish thousands of missiles now while they’re able produce the them in artisanal numbers. Since the US still has ambitions of challenging China in Asia, that’s where whatever they’re able to produce will go. They already had to pull weapons from the vassals all over the world like THAAD batteries from Korea. That’s how things are going.
And I don’t see how the rest of NATO will magic factories and logistics chains into being. This isn’t like printing money. Real world infrastructure takes decades to build. You have to train the workers, build factories, engineer machines, and so on. There is no way to produce all that in the foreseeable future in nations that are thoroughly deindustrialized. The skill base isn’t there.
If the US pulled out, the rational thing for smaller countries would be to make deals with other big powers like China to balance the US.
The last point shows that the alliance is not combat effective. So, it’s not going to provide the kind of protection people expect even if it did survive, and magically figured out how to produce weapons at scale.
It’s weird that you keep emphasizing weapons sales. Weapons sales have nothing to do with maintaining NATO, as a defensive alliance. Sure, you need weapons to defend yourself and your allies…but you wouldn’t just cancel the alliance if your stockpiles are low, or your supply chains were inadequate. It also has nothing to do with their current combat effectiveness. Those considerations have nothing to do with maintaining the alliance.
And there’s no “magic” involved when you are scaling up your own production. It takes investment. Not magic. Europe has some of the most advanced military manufacturing on the planet…just not at the scale necessary to cut the US out of the loop. That’s where the investment would come in…to scale up production to meet demand. It isn’t about inventing new capabilities on the fly. Those capabilities already exist.
And no, the “rational thing” would not be to turn to China. They are not a NATO ally. Why would anyone in NATO turn to a potential adversary for their military tech? That’s almost as bad as relying on the US under their current administration. China is notorious for copyright infringement, as it is. Why would anyone trust them to keep highly sensitive military technologies proprietary?
First of all, NATO is not a defensive alliance by any stretch of imagination. This alliance has a long history of invading and destroying countries and it’s responsible for killing and displacing millions of people. NATO invaded Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya.
Second, it’s kind of weird that you don’t understand why weapons production is a key part of a military alliance. Who produces the military strength is, in fact, the key question. And read what I actually wrote. What I said was that replacing the US role would take decades. I said there’s no magic way to shortcut that.
We can also see how this investment of yours works out in practice already. Europeans pledged to produce 1.5 mil artillery shells for Ukraine. A bunch of money was allocated to various slush funds, and the shells never materialized. That’s what NATO is actually good at, sucking money out of productive economy and driving austerity to line the pockets of the oligarchs.
And not sure which capabilities you claim already exist. Given how NATO weapons performed in Ukraine and Iran, it’s pretty clear that there is no meaningful capability here.
And why would it matter whether China is a NATO ally or not. China is the only major world power that can contest the US. Why would anybody be imbecilic enough to want to turn China into a potential adversary? What sort of absolute idiocy would that be. Also, what military technology could China possibly steal from countries that are far behind it technologically in every way. What fantasy world do live in? Chinese universities dominate world rankings right now. China has more scientists than all of the west combined. They’re at the bleeding edge of pretty much every technological field.
If anything, it’s NATO countries who would be stealing Chinese tech and not the other way around.
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