US President Donald Trump is in a pickle. Having put his foot down over the controversial border wall, the enigmatic billionaire has put himself and millions of Americas up against a wall. Excuse the metaphor, but his determination, while admirable, is going to end up in disaster. As I type this, hundreds of thousands of federal workers are in limbo in what’s sure to become the longest US government shutdown on record.
When paychecks don’t hit direct deposit this Friday, it won’t be Donald Trump or congressional Democrats shuffling to try and pay bills. Trump’s opposition on the border wall issue cannot give, and neither can the president. And the whole mess is over what has to be the craziest political football that ever existed. I’ll admit I originally supported the border wall campaign promise by Trump, but reason has a way of creeping in over time. This administration’s other zaniness having moderated my zeal to elect change, a wall in between Mexico and the United States in this day and age, it’s just nonsense. Let’s look at the situation from a far-off standpoint.
What caused this need for tighter border restrictions in the first place? This is one question we need to ask before buying Trump’s wall program hook-line-and-sinker. We’ve been sold a bill of goods as far as explaining the migrant explosion to America, this I can tell you. The thousands of Central American migrants lugging it through Mexico towards the US are fleeing poverty and violence that filled the vacuum of Cold War struggle. However, their plight has just as much to do with another Trump policy nightmare. This Guardian report frames climate change as a variable as important as these other factors. The fact that these migrants are leaving because climate change has destroyed their food sources is never reported in the mainstream. The bottom line is, Central America has a rapidly disintegrating food security problem. So, most of those “undesirables” Mr. Trump and his army of right-wing extremists warn us against; they’re starving to death. Excuse, me. What would you or I do if our families had nothing to eat, were beaten or shot at by gangs, and if we could not find work? Let me make another point before we move on.
Which countries in the world have walls that separate them from their neighbors? How many can you name? Well, one I can think of is Jordan. It’s interesting to note that the United States is actually funding the building of a border fence in between Jordan, Syria, and Iraq in order to “protect” America’s ally in the region against terrorists. Yes, $500 million in US taxpayer money was spent to build a fence in between these three Middle East countries. Just so you understand the geniuses at our State Department and in our Pentagon, the Jordan Border Security Program or JBSP, “is meant to stop weapons of mass destruction from getting out.” We all know the terror ISIS or Al Qaeda feel when they come in contact with chain link fences with barbed wire in the middle of those barren deserts. Surely, they turn and run with their VX gas rockets and etc.
Did you come up with any other impenetrable walls in between nations? Did you know there is a trend? Honestly, I was not even aware of the fact that dozens of nations have built, or they are building border walls to stem the flow of migrants. For years, the United States, and Israel were the only major nations with border security fences like the one Trump want to enhance. There’s now one going up in between India and Bangladesh, one was built in between Saudi Arabia and Iraq back in 2004, and there’s a proposed one in between Pakistan and Afghanistan, just to name a few. Interestingly, the majority of nations do not have such barriers in place. My friends, what we are witnessing is an idiotic bandaid for a disastrous epidemic about to cover our planet.
Until I began researching for this report, I was unaware that at the end of World War II there were fewer than five border walls in the world. Only 5! By the time the Berlin Wall came down, the world had 15 such barriers. Today, there are 70 according to Élisabeth Vallet, a professor of geography at the University of Québec at Montréal. I know Donald Trump, and his rocket scientist minions will take solace in this, and then use the numbers to justify America’s “beautiful” new wall. The rest of us, people who can still think, we will be thinking about the larger picture about now. What caused the epidemic? How can we reverse the disease that puts us all in peril? These and other questions seem muffled among the Trump Tweets and CNN babbling. Reece Jones, in a report from the Migration Policy Institute, puts it this way, “Did border walls work in the past?”
An epic example of border security cited by Jones is none other than the so-called Great Wall of China. This Earth wonder, it turns out, is not really all that wonderful at all. Our teachers in grade school often told us the Great Wall of China was over 2,000 years old, built to protect the Chinese people from the Mongol hordes. Unfortunately, this is a fairytale. There really is no “Great Wall” as we were propagandized. Do your own research, don’t take my word. The bottom line on this subject is pretty simple, but hard to swallow for many. Border walls have never worked, and they never will. Read your history, use some logic, own up to facts and stop believing every fiction that is convenient. Now, let’s move on to the real reason for today’s Trump power play. Matthew Yglesias at Vox, which I hate, spews out the truth in these matters, as hard as it is for some of us to read.
“Donald Trump campaigned on the absurd lie that the United States could construct a large concrete wall across the entire US-Mexico border and coerce the Mexican government into paying for its construction. The government is currently shut down because Trump refuses to admit that his absurd lie was, in fact, an absurd lie.”
Many of us supported Donald Trump as an alternative to a crazy, psychotic, killer, maniac Commander in Chief. Unfortunately, we forgot that all these psychopaths work for the same master. Like Yglesias says in the title to his story, “Trump has no idea what he’s doing.” Vox falls short in this report because they fail to mention the fact that the people propping Trump up do know what they are doing. I’ll wager this, underneath this government shutdown there are stock plays going on making the elites more billions. My previous reports on Trump’s handlers showed his Twitter rants lifting defense stocks, and you can bet there are many other monetary plays going on behind every single day Trump is in office. This wall mess and the shutdown is definitely not in the interest of the people of the United States of America. Let’s see if I am right.
Do you remember the dog and pony show televised from the Oval Office starring Donald Trump, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer? Well, that circus act was not what it appeared to be. The supposed partisanism was, in fact, a stock options announcement. Imagine Trump and his colleagues broadcasting they were about to close down the government, which is what this was. Now, read Bloomberg from late yesterday. The headline reads, “Stocks Climb But Fears of Ongoing Shutdown Linger: Markets Wrap.” Look at oil, for instance. Billionaires like Trump and his buddies could easily manipulate outcomes for energy, and what could stop them? Better yet, who would not leverage everything to perpetuate their family legacy? Let’s just be real and American here, shall we? Do you think for a moment all this stuff you hear, read, or see on CNN or at ABC is just news? While government shutdowns historically have a muted effect on the market, day to day individual plays are an immense opportunity if you know what is going to happen. This is not rocket science.
I’ll leave you with one example of how “Trump team knowledge” could lead to millions in profits. Let’s say you know the shutdown is going to last a couple of weeks. Your stock experts have told you that historically airline stocks tend to take a big hit during such turmoil. The clear sell-buy opportunity is there for anybody to see, and especially for plays before the shutdown even takes place. Just read Barron’s, pretend you have billions and nothing better to do than play with money. You can even hire your own minions, maybe even a president, and win like nobody’s ever won before. Welcome to the “War for the Wall” and Donald Trump not needing to know what he is doing.
Phil Butler, is a policy investigator and analyst, a political scientist and expert on Eastern Europe, he’s an author of the recent bestseller “Putin’s Praetorians” and other books. He writes exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”