Wil's Rant

This time they are going to impose sanctions. This is in response to the Byrd Amendment that the U.S. brought into law a couple of years ago. The U.S. has taken a tyrannical approach to trade with other nations for some time. The attitude taken has always been one of take it or lose your ability to sell goods to the U.S. at all. Canada is not the only country to feel outrage over these tactics and the distaste for it is spreading. More and more the U.S. is isolating itself from the rest of us lesser humans. In virtually every trade relationship they have, they have always taken the position that anyone else should be so thankful for being able to do business in the U.S. that we have to accept any conditions that the U.S. imposes. The rest of the globe is becoming less and less inclined to accept these terms. I continue to have hope that the U.S. will see the light at some point as the pressure keeps building to treat others with fairness and respect. Of course, this will require a new type of awareness and maturity in the U.S. of the rights, needs, and opinions of others that they have to date not shown. The problem is deeply rooted, so deep in fact that it is entirely uncertain whether the American people will accept trade on a fair and even basis with the rest of the world. So essentially, the Americans have placed themselves in a bit of a conundrum over this one. The Americans truly believe that this is their God given right as the leaders of the free world. They seem unwilling or unable to see that their long history of this kind of thinking is no longer acceptable to the rest of us. As much as the loss of trade will certainly hurt countries like Canada, we will adopt if necessary rather than continue under these conditions. There are other countries who are prepared to conduct relations with us on an equal basis and the current situation is causing us to examine these options more and more. While there is still time for the Americans to act on a more evolved basis, I have no doubt that it is going to take some time before anyone else is going to believe that the Americans have truly changed. They have lost a great deal of the faith and trust that the rest of us have for them, not that anyone in the know ever had much. Probably a good thing in the end as the concept of shipping goods that can be manufactured locally across the globe ever made any sense from an ecological standpoint anyway, but that goes back to the concept of true cost over perceived cost, but that's another discussion.