USA – unreliable, undemocratic, and its citizens are not free compared to me

Written By: - Date published: 1:47 pm, February 26th, 2025 - 15 comments
Categories: Donald Trump, International, military, us politics - Tags:

Read an amusing quora reply that rather crystallised my thinking on the US compared to here. It started as a click-bait clearly written by the usual American fool blinded by propaganda glare from their border mirrors.

Isn’t it hilarious how Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand mock the United States when in reality, they’re just jealous we’re the land of the free while they are still ruled by a monarchy?

The Canadian respondent said

As a Canadian, short of assaulting or threatening Charles III, I could level a string of profanities at the man and there is nothing that could legally be done about it. Nothing. This is because, like my Colonial Cousins, I have Freedom of Expression. It is actually guaranteed in Canada’s constitution that I can do so. We call it the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

ETA/ In fact, as our Commonwealth cousins in Barbados did in 2021, I can advocate for, and participate in, the abolition of the Monarchy of Canada without fear or favour. /end ETA

Now, I wouldn’t do so, but you need to understand that Charles, like his mother and grandfather before him, is a Constitutional Monarch. As King of Canada, he has little actual power. In fact, Charles works for me and every other citizen of the Commonwealth in that sense.

Funny that you should mention Canada, Australia and New Zealand, deriding our supposed lack of freedom. You might care to wander over to the Freedom House, an organization that tracks . . . you guessed it, democratic freedom of counties around the world.

New Zealand is ranked as Number Two in the world. Go Kiwis! Canada is Number Five. Australia comes in at 17 and the United States of America is waaaaaaaaaay down the list at 58, just above Croatia. I mean, sure, you’re in the top quartile but only just.

In Canada, my kid can go to school without fear of being shot. If I have to go to the hospital today for something major, I won’t go bankrupt. My health insurer won’t decide they just don’t want to honour the contract they agreed to. I can go to the library and sign out a copy of To Kill A Mockingbird. My wife can decide on how to best manage her reproductive health without fear of government overreach. The Handmaid’s Tale is dystopian fiction here, not a blueprint for how to run a government.

So, please do tell me more about this freedom you think you have. It sounds fascinating.

Well said.

Plus of course the USA has been steadily getting unhinged, and now appears to be driving down a precipitous slope from republic to a populist autocracy and probably eventually to a empire building state. Like all republics it has been gridlocked in legislative branch now for decades and increasingly run by constitutional executive dictators making weird decisions. For instance George W Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003 was simply insane – and that was obvious as he was building his dickhead ‘coalition of the willing’.

I am not a pacifist – far from it. I simply read far too much history to ever fall into that trap for the fantasists and those who let hope overwhelm common sense. Not to mention volunteering to join our army, and doing many years building software, hardware and deploying it to train soldiers to be more effective.

But increasingly as I look at the USA and how it has bee running its policies in recent decades, I want little to do with them. Not at a military level, foreign policy level, or even getting tied up in their economies. They are far too unstable as a society. The only major countries that I’d be less interested on getting involved in – for similar but differing reasons, are Russia and China.

Currently we have Trump and the current USA administration actively supporting two of the three invasions to annex sovereign territory. The Russian Federation invasion of Ukraine since 2014. Israel’s savage occupation of Palestinian territories since Egypt and Jordan returned them for the establishment of a Palestinian state.

I can imagine Donald Trump also diving into the shitfest effective annexations of mineral rich areas of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where Rwanda has been running a surrogate war for some time. It will be tarted up like Putin did on his stupid unprovoked assault on Ukraine, but it’d be done for the same reason – to grab valuable resources.

We have had a relatively peaceful 80 years despite vast increases in world population. This has, in my view, largely been because of a strong international policy of stopping wars of annexation. See Wikipedia’s List of wars by death toll if you don’t have a sense of historical scale.

It now appears that we have a major military and economic superpower that has moved away from that path. With the pronouncements of Trump and his envoys about Ukraine, Greenland and Panama – the USA is clearly leaning towards economic and military annexations.

The USA has far more military capability than anyone else in our region (if you don’t understand what that means, please read the link). That includes the Australians, Chinese, and Indonesians – the next most potentially dangerous when you look at military capabilities projected into our local region (and trade) outside of nuclear capabilities.

Now that the USA policy intentions, and therefore ultimately their military intentions, appear to have shifted towards the fools game of annexation. So we should start acting as if the world incuding our region and trade routes have become a much more dangerous place. It takes some time to wind up military capabilities. But clearly the speed of military intentions in the USA (and possibly China) is changing at a much more rapid rate.

In our case, that means mostly naval and aerospace in various forms. Probably leaning towards drone weapons to cover out immense exclusive economic zone.

I really don’t want to see a modern equivalent of Theodore Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet turning up in Auckland on a ‘friendly’ visit again.

15 comments on “USA – unreliable, undemocratic, and its citizens are not free compared to me ”

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  1. Descendant Of Smith 1
    26 February 2025 at 4:12 pm

    A friend of mine is of Cuban descent. Her parents have worked in high value and valued positions in NASA and elsewhere. She has plenty of extended family in Cuba. She has never been to see any of them.

    She said it is quite simple – you can't fly to Cuba from the US so you have to go from Mexico. While the authorities at both Mexico's and Cuba's end are good about not stamping passports so you don't get identified as having been to Cuba when going back into the US she said it is still not worth the risk of losing your job, having IRS suddenly decide to audit you for the last 10 years and other consequences. Was very sad.

    My non-religious sister lived in the US in a small town. If you didn't go to church you were ostracised. Horrible place to live. Her husband had his spine broken when his boss shook the ladder he was on. He had to sue to get his medical bills paid but 80% of the settlement went to lawyers. Totally corrupt.

    Both those things 15-20 years ago.

    Land of the free – hardly.

  2. bwaghorn 2
    26 February 2025 at 5:05 pm

    Nice post

  3. Macro 3
    26 February 2025 at 5:07 pm

    Meanwhile….

    Twenty-one federal technology staffers resigned from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, citing concerns over dismantling public services. The employees, formerly part of the U.S. Digital Service, said they would “not use our skills as technologists to compromise core government systems, jeopardize Americans’ sensitive data, or dismantle critical public services.” Their resignation letter warned that Musk’s efforts to shrink the federal workforce relied on inexperienced political appointees and posed security risks.

  4. Psycho Milt 4
    26 February 2025 at 6:48 pm

    No argument with most of this, and especially not with GW Bush's Iraq invasion being "insane" (I was living in Kuwait 2003 – 2006 and heard first-hand accounts of what a clusterfuck the Iraq occupation was), but have to dispute the idea that "Egypt and Jordan returned [Palestinian territories] for the establishment of a Palestinian state."

    That's like saying Germany "returned" Poland or Iraq "returned" Kuwait. Being expelled via a crushing military defeat isn't the return of territory as a diplomatic initiative.

    • lprent 4.1
      26 February 2025 at 8:58 pm

      Being expelled via a crushing military defeat isn't the return of territory as a diplomatic initiative.

      Ever listen to yourself? Spin that argument the other way

      Israelis argue that they had a right to its historic lands after drifting away from them after being conquered, enslaved, and finding better opportunities around the Med over a thousand years of so.

      Of course getting murdered in job lots in the 20th appears to have given wannabe Israelis the desperation to come back and start murdering their cousins in job lots. Where do you think that tribes in Palestine mostly came from after the Levites scarpered off after riches.

      …but have to dispute the idea that "Egypt and Jordan returned [Palestinian territories] for the establishment of a Palestinian state."

      That was the intent for those territories in 1947/8. It was also explicit in the treaties that had both states dropping their claims to those territories.

      Unfortunately Israelis appeared to have no actual intent in 1948 or later to doing anything apart from annexing those territories. Now they are working their way towards performing mass murder on their cousins for no other real reason than they can.

      • Psycho Milt 4.1.1
        27 February 2025 at 1:57 pm

        That was the intent for those territories in 1947/8.

        Those territories are less than was intended and offered in 1947, but the offer was rejected. Israel was the only state declared within the borders of mandate Palestine.

        It was also explicit in the treaties that had both states dropping their claims to those territories.

        They had no legitimate claim to those territories, but regardless, their face-saving clause for their lost conquests to form the basis of a Palestinian state was a non-starter. Palestinians aren't interested in having just those territories for their state, Israel isn't keen to give the territory up in any case, and both sides could outdo mules for stubbornness. Govts of Egypt and Jordan knew that as well as anyone, they were just putting a brave face on having been ruthlessly and shamefully embarrassed on the battlefield.

  5. joe90 5
    26 February 2025 at 6:55 pm

    Plus of course the USA has been steadily getting unhinged, and now appears to be driving down a precipitous slope from republic to a populist autocracy and probably eventually to a empire building state

    According to the author, self-inflicted, too.

    .

    How the U.S.-backed war on Palestine is expanding authoritarianism at home—from Project Esther to violence at the border.

    […]

    But resisting fascism is our collective goal. We just know that in order to resist it, we have to fight it on two fronts of U.S. state violence: at home and abroad. Because if the United States, together with Israel, manages to disembowel the ICJ, the ICC, the UN, and a broader global order built after the Holocaust and World War II, no one is safe. The fact that Israel has committed genocide, turned humans into walking bombs in its pager attack in Lebanon, and decimated countries while the UN Security Council watches passively should concern all of us. As Colombian President Gustavo Petro warned back in December 2023, “What we are seeing in Gaza is a rehearsal of the future.”

    If only more people in the United States had taken his words seriously. During the election, the work of several initiatives, such as the Uncommitted movement and Not Another Bomb, emphasized the centrality of ending U.S. warmaking to a progressive agenda. Other efforts, like Abandon Biden/Harris, went further, highlighting the similarity between right-wing fascism and “authoritarian liberalism.” All labored to make the entwinement of domestic and foreign policy visible—but that message was drowned out by the dehumanization of Palestinians, itself underwritten by the War on Terror’s racialization of Arabs and Muslims as presumptively guilty terrorists.

    It was thus unsurprising that throughout the election cycle, nearly all the mainstream liberal pundits sounding the alarm about white supremacy, jingoism, xenophobia, and political violence failed to connect these things to U.S. imperial violence. What if, rather than blaming Palestinians, Arab Americans, and American Muslims, these pundits had seen their treatment—under Biden and for decades before him—as central to the Trump-led repression looming before us?

    […]

    In his searing 1950 polemic Discourse on Colonialism, Martinican writer Aimé Césaire wrote of the “boomerang effect,” whereby violence in the colonial periphery manifests itself in the colonial metropole. Hitler’s genocide of European Jews, he noted, was modeled after European rule over African and Asian colonies. (He may have had in mind the German extermination of the Nama and Herero people in Namibia during their period of colonial rule from 1884 and 1915—a period of brutality that scarcely registered in Europe while it was taking place.) Some seventy-five years later, Césaire’s point has been borne out many times over: there is no clear dividing line between a colonial power’s imperial geography and its metropole.

    https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-boomerang-comes-back/

    https://archive.li/iwM0L

  6. Scud 6
    26 February 2025 at 7:26 pm

    Unfortunately the International Rules Base Order is slowly being dismantled & everyone is batting down the hatches because what happens next is anyone one guess?

    If history has taught us anything, it probably won't be pretty when an empire collapses & implodes internally

    Atm, we PLA-N Willy Waving in the Tasman Sea while doing a FON which makes the so called Famous Statement "We live in a Benign Strategic Environment" look rather dated & stupid atm.

    The Strategic implications for NZ are huge now from a Economic Security, Defence and finally MFAT who in the last 6yrs haven't exactly good or well received in some areas of its remit.

    As NZ's Economic Security & the NZDF, we haven't seen this type of shenanigans by a Foreign Navy since WW2!

    When the DKM Merchant Raiders were active laying Sea Mine's around & some cases sinking NZ Merchant Ships or undertaking Surface Operations and again sinking a number of NZ Ships in & around NZ Waters. Then we also have DKM U Boats & Jap I Boats out of Singer's operating in NZ Waters during WW2 which very uncoordinated & lacking Mass (numbers) to doing anything meaningful.

    It reminds of my late NZ Grandparents & Great Aunty Gerry a Quaker btw, that alot of NZ'ers said oh Japan won't attack us because of the RN in Singers & the US Pacific Fleet. But atm we have again lot of NZ'ers from sides of the political spectrum incl here on The Standard & over at Bombers blog, that China won't attack us (directly or indirectly) because we are their biggest trading partner?

    Well given what is happening in the USA right now and it's siding with China & Tsar Poots on a number of issues, & Winnie Poo in China quoting he wants 🇹🇼 back in China's fold by 2027 or at the end of this decade?

    I'm starting to wonder if it's now a possibility or near certainly this will happen now given the International Rules Base Order is now being slowly dismantled.

    Yet Robert Reid & Greg Presland (Mickey Savage) have criticised UK Labour for increase the UK's Defence Budget!

    But they seem to have forgotten when the World was last time at these crossroads. That a certain Mickey Savage started to increase the NZ Defence Budget (incl Bob Semple's MoW building Defence bases etc) around 1938 at the possiblity of war in Europe but also in the Pacific when he ordered 30 or so Long Range Maritime Aircraft etc and increased the NZ Navy Division while the Army prepared it's mobilisation plans to prepare for Conflict.

    Mickey Savage took a buck each bet, hoping diplomacy remain it's primacy in preventing War while planning & preparing for the Worst case option of Conflict.

    Being a student of History (politics & Military) and a Veteran with Combat Service, it might be a good to start preparing for the likelihood of armed Conflict as the political/ diplomacy side of things isn't too flash atm unless the US democrats win big in the mid term elections & if they don't.

    Then we are going to be in one hell of a ride that we never experienced since our Grandparents during WW2.

    As I don't really want to be called back up again unless I can wear my No1 Highland Dress & my Black Beret of the RNZAC again instead of that horrible Bronze Green Beret that the NZ Tankies have to wear these days or they can fuck off (looking at you Politicians) 😄

    • lprent 6.1
      26 February 2025 at 9:12 pm

      Mickey Savage took a buck each bet, hoping diplomacy remain it's primacy in preventing War while planning & preparing for the Worst case option of Conflict.

      Exactly. Happened too late and we, the aussies, and everyone else were really short of military capability when the Germans annexed in Europe and the Japanese navy came down the island chain towards us.

      Savage might have objected strongly to wasting lives in a silly game of empires. But he was completely realistic about how isolated and vulnerable we were in intent of the potential enemies in the post-war period. He prepared not only locally, but also in providing a reason for UK and US to keep looking out in this region.

      Being a student of History (politics & Military) and a Veteran with Combat Service, it might be a good to start preparing for the likelihood of armed Conflict as the political/ diplomacy side of things isn't too flash atm unless the US democrats win big in the mid term elections & if they don't.

      My issues is that I don't see the US stabilising internally or externally even if the Democrats do win elections. Their underlying system is too rigid with too many people standing by their inalienable rights rather than adjusting to a changing world. This is how republican systems die. They start venerating dickhead leaders rather than nurturing trained ones.

      The whole political system over there has been oscillating like crazy for decades now. This latest swing just happens to be a bit wider and wilder than previous ones. But I can't see it getting better over the long term.

      As I don’t really want to be called back up again…

      Seems unlikely, I’m more likely to put my bad back into service writing code than you are likely to be dropped into a tank.

    • SPC 6.2
      27 February 2025 at 1:13 am

      Hipkins advice to Peters

      https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/543021/labour-leader-chris-hipkins-says-prime-minister-must-prioritise-visiting-china

      Corin Dann in Beijing

      https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/543085/watch-rnz-s-corin-dann-in-beijing-ahead-of-foreign-ministers-meeting

      Well given what is happening in the USA right now and it's siding with China & Tsar Poots on a number of issues, & Winnie Poo in China quoting he wants ROC back in China's fold by 2027 or at the end of this decade?

      I'm starting to wonder if it's now a possibility or near certainly this will happen now given the International Rules Base Order is now being slowly dismantled.

      I have doubts about the quote, but note this here

      Shane Jones is stating that he has no problem with China being the party taking the fishing and seabed mineral resources out of the South Pacific in return for their investment in development (shades of Ukraine).

      New Zealand First Deputy Leader Shane Jones says China is providing the practical aid Pacific nations are seeking.

      The Fisheries Minister is in the Solomon Islands for a preliminary meeting with Oceanic leaders ahead of the 2025 United Nations Oceans Conference in France this June.

      He says China’s recent deals with the Solomon Islands and the Cook Islands highlight a growing trend of Pacific nations prioritizing robust infrastructure aid that supports economic development in their territories.

      “A lot of our aid has historically gone into human capital, institutional building and what you might call soft infrastructure. And no doubt they’re going to continue to look for options that give them, for example, the new hospital here in the Solomons was built by China,” says Jones.

      https://waateanews.com/2025/02/25/shane-jones-china-meets-pacific-aid-needs/

      Obviously this complicates the work of both Peters and Luxon in responding to recent events.

  7. Nic the NZer 7
    27 February 2025 at 7:11 am

    Greg Palast has investigated the scale of vote suppression tactics in the most recent US election. He plausibly claims 3.5million votes for Harris were not counted, including a lot in key swing states.

    The new tactic was resurrecting Jim Crow era laws allowing anonymous vote challenge with some specific individuals challenging in bulk thousands of voters and leaving them defacto off with a lot of work to find out and reinstate their right to vote.

  8. lprent 8
    27 February 2025 at 8:11 am

    The issues about unreliability of the USA are starting to strongly reverberate into the tech sphere as well. For instance from The Register: "Under Trump 2.0, Europe's dependence on US clouds back under the spotlight".

    In a recent blog post titled "It is no longer safe to move our governments and societies to US clouds," Bert Hubert, an entrepreneur, software developer, and part-time technical advisor to the Dutch Electoral Council, articulated such concerns.

    "We now have the bizarre situation that anyone with any sense can see that America is no longer a reliable partner, and that the entire large-scale US business world bows to Trump’s dictatorial will, but we STILL are doing everything we can to transfer entire governments and most of our own businesses to their clouds," wrote Hubert.

    Hubert didn’t offer data to support that statement, but European Commission stats shows that close to half of European enterprises rely on cloud services, a market led by Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, Salesforce, and IBM – all US-based companies.

    While concern about cloud data sovereignty became fashionable back in 2013 when former NSA contractor Edward Snowden disclosed secrets revealing the scope of US signals intelligence gathering and fled to Russia, data privacy worries have taken on new urgency in light of the Trump administration’s sudden policy shifts.

    We have many of the same problems here. There is a massive reliance in our government systems on Microsoft systems. There also appears to be considerable reluctance to move to US (or any) cloud based systems partially because of the potential for issues based in US internal politics.

    And there's also a practical impetus for the unrest: organizations that use Microsoft Office 2016 and 2019 have to decide whether they want to move to Microsoft's cloud come October 14, 2025, when support officially ends. Microsoft is encouraging customers to move to Microsoft 365 which is tied to the cloud. But that looks riskier now than it did under less contentious transatlantic relations.

    It is possible that this is the reason that I recently came across Auckland Health still using Microsoft Outlook 2010 as a major email system. But that is just as likely to be due to the IT chaos in NZ Health as demand outstrips resources. Successive governments haven't funded demographic ageing in advance, so the tech infrastructure budget keeps getting slashed. But 2010 is a really old system.

    But look at the examples that Hurbert was pointing to. For instance. The ICC

    And then we saw Trump sanction the International Criminal Court (ICC) here in The Hague. And the ICC has already indicated that most of their stuff runs on [Microsoft] Azure. And they feel that they're being locked out of their work right now.

    Yeah, I'm working on Azure at present for paid work. The idea that dumbarse US politicians who could at any time let crazy fools like the DOGE team muddle around with online systems for political or 'deal' reasons is enough to make me not want to interact with US providers. There is a high degree of trust involved, and the potential for trust is diminishing. After all look at the cloud agreements about data localisation on cloud systems

    If you look at their formal statements, they're all like, yeah, well, it's highly unlikely that this will happen.

    But if you look at the legal situation…So interestingly, the Dutch government got sort of in a fight with itself. And then they hired a New York legal firm, a very, very good one. And they asked that New York legal firm, can you analyze the legal situation for us?

    And they came back with, yeah, if the US demands your email, Microsoft will hand over your email. And there are no ifs and buts about it.

    And there were even no ifs and buts about it under the Biden administration, who sort of were attached to this rule of law thing.

    But even if you believe in the rule of law thing, then the US legislative situation is very clear. If the NSA wants to get their hands on the French email or the Dutch email, they're going to get it.

    And legally speaking, there's nothing Microsoft and Google and Amazon could do about that. And you can even wonder these days if there's anything they want to do about that.

    Interesting article and interview