4 min read
Baby want. Baby get. From The Guardian:
An American oil company connected to Donald Trump is preparing to sink wells in remote Greenland despite not having received permission from the local authorities. As the U.S. president renews his threats to claim the vast Arctic territory, materials to prepare for drilling were brought ashore in recent days on Greenland’s eastern coast. That has prompted Greenland’s government to issue a “strong warning” that no approval had been granted to land the kit. “All future logistical matters must be advised and approved by the mineral resources authority—before they are carried out,” the government said in a statement.Greenland Energy has retained Phil McGraw, better known as Dr. Phil, a prominent rightwing former chatshow host who served on Trump’s religious freedom commission, to make a documentary series that will “capture the mission of these modern-day wildcatters”. It has also appointed as a director a U.S. navy veteran who is working on Golden Dome, the missile defence plan for which Trump says controlling Greenland is “vital”. Larry Swets, Greenland Energy’s chair and a big shareholder, appears to enjoy access to Trump’s circle. He has said the oil project is “not related to American annexation”.
Jim Wright—Stonekettle, to his countless fans on the Intertoobz—beat me to this parallel, dammit. This is nothing less than the same kind of rapacious greed that tangled the United States in Central American politics on behalf of the United Fruit Company.
They’ll land the gear, claim to be peaceful oil drillers, provoke a confrontation which they’ll escalate into a violent one, the Press will paint the Americans as the victims … and give Trump an excuse to invade and annex Greenland in order to “protect Americans and American interests.” Those who forget history are doomed to watch their government repeat the dirty tricks of the past.
Greenland, Denmark, and, hell, the rest of NATO should mobilize against this land grab and start arresting people by the carload. And if you don’t think this is being done at the express will of the president, and if you don’t think he’s already counting on his slice, I advise you to seek professional help. And it’s already going on. You can tell by the lies.
After a company representative falsely claimed at a Jameson Land community meeting in June that it had permission to land drilling equipment, Swets said: “Our enthusiasm for the project led us to communicate in a way that created confusion.”
Oh, shut up.
But the next month, local people in the sparsely populated region noticed a tug pulling a barge shorewards and unloading a dozen containers. “The goal was to get the equipment onshore at Nunap Qeqqa [Jameson Land] in connection with planned oil exploration drilling,” the Greenland government’s statement said.
And Greenland isn’t the only place where unleashed corporate greed is playing mumbledy-peg with sovereign nations, their populations, and their natural resources. It’s like we have brought back colonialism without the paperwork. Last October, the Oakland Institute published a report about the exploitation of the mineral wealth in the unfortunate Democratic Republic of the Congo, which continues to have a bloody war raging in its eastern half, an ongoing Ebola outbreak, a major drought, and dozens of other crises. A war between Rwanda and the DRC is one of the eight wars the president has claimed to stop.
“U.S. involvement in Congolese affairs has always been unequivocally tied to the goal of securing access to critical minerals,” said Frédéric Mousseau, report co-author and Policy Director at the Oakland Institute. “The ‘peace’ deal comes after decades of U.S. training, advising and sponsoring foreign armies and rebel movements, and at a time when Rwanda and its proxy M23 have expanded territorial control in eastern DRC. This is a win-lose deal that serves U.S. mining interests and rewards Rwanda for decades of pillaging Congolese resources.”The report’s analysis of previously overlooked coltan trade data shows that the U.S. has been a central actor in laundering illegally smuggled Congolese minerals. Rwanda’s overall tantalum (metallic ore extracted from coltan) exports to the U.S. increased 15-fold between 2013 and 2018. This was after the first M23 invasion in 2012 and at the time when the U.S. administration waived its sanction mechanism against Rwanda. At its peak, over half of US imports of tantalum originated from Rwanda, despite the country’s limited production. “With the world’s largest reserves of critical minerals, the Congolese will continue to bear the social and environmental costs of extraction, while Rwanda reaps the benefits from processing and exporting its neighbor’s resources,” said Andy Currier, report co-author and Policy Analyst at the Oakland Institute. “The deception is even more obvious knowing that Rwanda’s Minister of State for Regional Integration is none other than James Kabarebe—sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury in early 2025 for orchestrating Rwanda’s support for the M23, coordinating the export of minerals from the DRC, and managing the revenue generated by this extraction,” Currier continued.
Cecil Rhodes, please call home.