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EU Parliament freezes US trade deal ratification

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Re: EU Parliament freezes US trade deal ratification

#61

Post by joe_mamba »

inglor_cz wrote: post #38
joe_mamba wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I would expect it to get vetoed by special farmer interests IDK man, I feel like supporting the local farming industry is a pretty important strategic move, even if it's a loss leader. We already offshored manufacturing, energy supply and IT to our "allies" in the past and it's biting us in the ass right now. Do we really want to repeat the same mistake again with food?

Everything is a trade-off. Farmers have a lot of influence in the EU. Personally, I think they are already too dominant, for historic reasons. And yes, I get that food is important. Maybe the answer would be to unburden them from European regulations, which are pretty onerous. The few people active in agriculture I know complain about insane paper wars with authorities all the time. One farmer I know got a hefty fine…

>for historic reasons

Yes. The need to feed one's self and family is pretty historically important going back since we were primordial organisms to medieval times when if peasants didn't have food they'd riot and behead the king.

>European regulations, which are pretty onerous.

Onerous regulations that seek to prevent ... checks notes ... the use of slave labor and chemicals that damage human health and the environment. But sure, let's bypass all that and import food from countries that use slave labor and toxic pesticides while the EU virtue signals on Twatter how their mission is protecting humans from racism and exploitation and saving the environment, but apparently apart from those in countries where we import our food from, there they can do whatever exploitation they want as long as they give us cheap stuff. It's not hypocritical at all.

Definitely not gonna bite us in the ass in 10+ years time when the leader of one of those countries with a shaky track record on democracy and human rights, decides to weaponize our food dependence on them to gain some advantages or just mow down some more the Amazon for profit while killing the indigenous, and all the EU is gonna do is write a sternly worded X post about "carefully monitoring the situation" at best, or at worst turn a blind eye and pretend a genocide isn't happening, just like they did with Azerbaijan's bombing of Nagorno-Karabakh because they were now dependent on Azerbaijani gas after giving up on Russian gas in 2022.

Stupid EU regulations or not, giving up sovereignty on energy and food supply to third parties is bad idea all of the time, because it's guaranteed to be weaponized against you at some point.

>One farmer I know got a hefty fine for building an impromptu shed for extra kids that were born beyond the expected count.

Sounds like a local council, conty or national issue to me, not an EU issue.

Re: EU Parliament freezes US trade deal ratification

#62

Post by captn3m0 »

nosianu wrote: post #40
thecopy wrote: post #11

It all seems so surprisingly unnecessary. Angry geriatric man f*cks the world up for generations to come, then in a short bit he will die, and not have to live through the consequences.

You will have to translate this German language article, but this is NOT Trump. It is about the tech billionaires supporting this quest, and why they want it. https://orf.at/stories/3417584/ I doubt Trump would have ever even thought of Greenland on his own. I think was told about it, and the narrative planted in his head deliberately. This focus on "Trump" in Internet comments and media irks me to no end. Trump is n…

We even know which billionaire planted the Greenland idea: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/15/ronald-laude...

Re: EU Parliament freezes US trade deal ratification

#63

Post by atoav »

ViewTrick1002 wrote: post #32
thecopy wrote: post #11

It all seems so surprisingly unnecessary. Angry geriatric man f*cks the world up for generations to come, then in a short bit he will die, and not have to live through the consequences.

Trump is the symptom, not the cause. The cause the US people.

Yes and no. Because you can always go one level higher and ask:

Why are the US people the cause?

And then we will talk about structural issues, to do with social mobility, education, a dysfunctional journalistic landscape, a tribalization of the political landscape and so on. But of course it doesn't stop there. You can go one up:

Why did these underlying causes came to be?

The simple answer is that a certain loose conglomerate of polticians, billionaires and CEOs thought it would profit them (it did). You can pick one of the issues mentioned above and go deep on why it is in the bad shape it is today and the answer will always boil down to lobbying and money in politics.

This are the much more insightful reasons and you get there just by asking "but why?" two times like a yound child. Totally recommended.

Re: EU Parliament freezes US trade deal ratification

#64

Post by smashah »

kzrdude wrote: post #50
ViewTrick1002 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trump is the symptom, not the cause. The cause the US people.

That is a very simplified take. Congress has been locking up for the past decades and is now unable to do useful regulation for the people. Much of it is due to how the funding of candidates works and the feedback loop effect it had on the political culture. Trump is a symptom of this failure of political culture too.

...A political culture the public has voted for by allowing it to continue despite being bound by a constitutional duty to prevent the same disenfranchisement you've described.

America will be judged by its own demonic standards. The standard by which they justified their participation in the Holocaust of Gaza ("they voted for it").

Re: EU Parliament freezes US trade deal ratification

#65

Post by yolo3000 »

renewiltord wrote: post #35
4gotunameagain wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had the US not had a demented lunatic as a president, none of this would've happened.

Trump or no Trump, the US's ability to be Europe's security shield had to come to an end one day or another. Trump is more a symptom than a cause: the US has weakened and others have strengthened. As many are eager to point out, the game is already up. Pretending like there is a future here is pointless. America had best leave internal European civil wars like Russia-Ukraine to the locals and retreat to whatever bord…

What's your point, that we should all build as many nuclear icmbs as possible? Because that is the only deterrent that the Russians and Americans truly have. This is a world no sane person would like to live in. The world we should live in is where we should respect the sovereignty of others and move away from using war and killing as a threat.

Re: EU Parliament freezes US trade deal ratification

#66

Post by ViewTrick1002 »

smashah wrote: post #59
ViewTrick1002 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trump is the symptom, not the cause. The cause the US people.

Foreign and Billionaire demonic interest have disenfranchised the people long ago. Luckily the people have a second-amendment constitutional duty to re-secure the free state. It's clear America is no longer a free state. One cannot be free in a panopticon.

It is time to stop blaming third parties. The truth is that congress is able to rein in Trump any second they want.

The reason they don't is that they know that they will get primaried and lose their seat for someone more aligned with the people and Trump.

Re: EU Parliament freezes US trade deal ratification

#67

Post by mk89 »

ginko wrote: post #33
mk89 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually the Green deal is an attempt at that. Masked as a way to save the planet, its goal is to get rid of deep dependencies like gas oil etc, which we in Europe don't have sufficiently. The main issue is the way the transition is happening, because I see China doing exactly what we should be doing: build coal, nuclear, etc. while you build tons of solar panels or windfarms. The self inflicting pain forced by radic…

I never understood why energy independence wasn’t put front and center when talking about this.

Because we have lost pragmatism over the last 40 years more or less. The leading politicians like to treat people in a way as if these didn't understand what's going on. So instead of saying energy independent, they call it CO2 tax. Their fake morality is what is actually causing all this.

Radical ideology has taken over, rather than pragmatic ideas. I don't know how that happened, but I know we are paying the price for it, although EU is rich enough to do exactly what China is doing. That alone would put us in a better position.

Re: EU Parliament freezes US trade deal ratification

#68

Post by ncruces »

sschueller wrote: post #25
littlestymaar wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if Trump died today, Vance would continue his nefarious job.

Exactly, just see the gal of garbage spewed by for example Scott Bessent at the WEF yesterday. The arrogance is outright insulting.

“The size of Denmark’s investment in US Treasury bonds, like Denmark itself, is irrelevant.”

So an ally is irrelevant.

People wonder why the EU is built the way it is, and behaves the way it does. It's precisely to avoid this. To bind Germany and France together and avoid the big powers treating smaller neighbors like this. I guess that's bad to some people.

This is not a trade dispute over something signed last summer. It's a lot bigger than that.

Re: EU Parliament freezes US trade deal ratification

#69

Post by izacus »

joe_mamba wrote: post #61
inglor_cz wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything is a trade-off. Farmers have a lot of influence in the EU. Personally, I think they are already too dominant, for historic reasons. And yes, I get that food is important. Maybe the answer would be to unburden them from European regulations, which are pretty onerous. The few people active in agriculture I know complain about insane paper wars with authorities all the time. One farmer I know got a hefty fine…

>for historic reasons Yes. The need to feed one's self and family is pretty historically important going back since we were primordial organisms to medieval times when if peasants didn't have food they'd riot and behead the king. >European regulations, which are pretty onerous. Onerous regulations that seek to prevent ... checks notes ... the use of slave labor and chemicals that damage human health and the environme…

I don't know what you're arguing about here because the farmers in EU are aggressively fighting against regulation to curtail chemicals, environmental controls and minimum healthy food quality mandates.
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