Australia, it's time to declare our independence from Trump's America

American cartoonist Ron Cobb drew this for issue #3 of The Digger on 3 September 1972. The soon-to-be elected Whitlam Labor Party was discussing closing or taking over the US spy-satellite station in the centre of Australia, a proposal revived by Malcolm Fraser shortly before his death last year.

So now that one in four grown-ups in the USA have voted for Donald Trump – and even though half a million more of them voted for Hillary Clinton than for Trump (How’s that work? The Electoral College) – we are going to have to live for four years or possibly eight with Trump and his gang running America. *

 For those who think Trump isn’t so bad, consider who his gang are: his 16-member transition team, led by VP Mike Pence who believes gays should be cured and creationism should be taught in public schools, includes three Trump children: Ivanka, Donald Jr., and Eric.

 The line-up of probable cabinet members includes ex-general Michael Flynn who wants unrestrained war on "Islam" – to head the Defense Dept., Rudy Guliani for Attorney General, who, when it was disclosed that Trump has evaded paying tax for decades, said: “Don’t you think a man who has this kind of economic genius is a lot better for the United States than a woman?” Education or Energy or Interior: Sarah Palin. And to run the Environmental Protection Agency the guy who wrote the book on climate denial (Myron Ebell) -- though Trump has said he will abolish both the EPA and the Department of Education.

 For Secretary of State Newt Gingrich, the former Republican Speaker of the House-- OR -- former UN ambassador John Bolton. Both specialize in snide taunts and abusive rhetoric, and are likely get the United States into a military confrontation within months, or days.

 A top gang member inside the White House will be Stephen Bannon, who until recently ran Breitbart News, which is home of the “alt right” and delights in being “funny” insulting Jews and non-whites.

 Trump will replace the late Supreme Court Justice Scalia with another deeply conservative judge – and with three “liberal” justices likely to retire or die soon, he’ll lock in a rabidly pro-business, pro-gun, and anti-privacy-rights Court. Three Trump picks for the Court are Judge William Pryor, who described Roe v Wade, the main US law giving women the right to abortions, as creating "a constitutional right to murder an unborn child", Judge Diane Sykes who is a crusader for the right to discriminate against LGBT people, and Judge Allison Eid who ruled that University students have a lawful right to carry loaded handguns in class. 

 And for those who thought Trump was outside the Wall Street box, his favourite to run the Treasury is Steve Mnuchin, like most Treasurers over the past 50 years, a graduate of the Goldman Sachs school for creating global financial crises.

So what will this mean for Australia?

 Peter Martin, Economics Editor for The Age, predicts that “President Donald Trump will declare economic war on our biggest customer [China], wipe unprecedented amounts off global stock markets, usher in extraordinary financial instability, and risk turning the world's biggest economy into a basket case by pushing its national debt past 100 per cent of GDP.”

 All of this suggests to me that we have to take serious action here in Australia, not just cheer on Michael Moore, Bernie Sanders and Green battlers in their fight to take over the Democratic Party.

 So I hereby suggest that it’s time that we – the Australian people and the nation we supposedly own – got a backbone transplant and declared ourselves independent, free at last, yes a republic free from the Queen and that nonsense, but we also need to declare ourselves free from the life we’ve been living since 1945 – as one of dozens of the abused children of the dysfunctional, bullying, life-destroying parents, the (dis)United States of America.

We need to tell President Trump and all his gangster mates that this country is not a room inside their house and we’re not going to be obedient kiddies any more, cowering when Daddy growls and grovelling when he calls.

 We should’ve done it decades ago. We should NOT have joined them when they invaded Vietnam, nor when they invaded Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, nor clapped and cheered in earlier decades when they invaded Egypt, the Congo, Cuba, Guatemala, Iran, Nicaragua, Grenada, Chile – where in each case they assassinated elected leaders – nor when they turned Libya into a jihadi training ground, and we should not be supporting them now in their never-ending crusade to beat the world into submission with their 800 military bases in more than 70 countries.

Since WW2 ended and then President General Dwight Eisenhower warned the world that the US government was being taken over by a military-industrial complex, successive Presidents have provided cover for the warlords. They’ve been genial (Reagan, Kennedy), self-righteous (Nixon, Bush 1), dimwits (Ford, Bush 2), and two of them tried to curb the warmongers but couldn’t (Carter and Obama), and now the green curtain has been pulled aside and we see clearly a President who is proud to be what he is: a global-sized bully and an utterly unprincipled deal-maker who puts profit not only before people but also before the planet itself.

 Millions of sensible and principled Australians have called for self-management over the decades, but now it is time to collectively do it: to declare our independence from the policies, principles and priorities of the Trump regime and of the USA itself. We have no trouble being independent from the other 194 nations on Earth, why are we willing to continue being bit players in the American nightmare?

 We can make agreements with them – trade agreements but not if they over-ride our own laws and priorities, and military ones on a case-by-case basis, but none that locks us inside an “interoperable” death pact.

I will end this plea – I was going to call it, in a classically self-deprecating Aussie way, a rant or a rave, but fuck that, this is a plea for a National Declaration – with two supporting quotes from two former Prime Ministers:

"The American alliance… has now taken on a reverential, sacramental quality.

"The foreign policy of Australia is basically we have tag-along rights to the US, and ... certainly since I left public office ... we've had more or less a tag-along foreign policy.

"It's time to cut the tag. It's time to get out of it."

– Paul Keating on ABC’s 7:30 November 10th 2016

“I’m asking Australia to break with her long past—the whole history of Australia from colonial times… Britain had the capacity to drag us into wars, and America now has [it], and I think it is time we grew up.

“We should … make up our minds to do something with Australia as a nation… we’d have to spend, invest in environment and water and infrastructure, but these things are not beyond us, and … we’d be in a better place to advance peace and security throughout our part of the world.”

– Malcolm Fraser interview with Robert Manne, Sydney Morning Herald April 25th 2014

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* For a detailed explanation of how the Trump gang and mainstream Republicans fixed the elections like the vet fixes your dog, go to GregPalast.com. He has a corny act but he does serious reporting for Rolling Stone, the BBC, and The Guardian.