However, it should be EU policy to force the dissolution of US monopolies on the European market - if only to reduce the risk of blackmail.

No no no… you have a point.

krasnov is doing a pretty good job so far.

It's not such a bad idea for us to consider honestly. What army can be maintained without taxes from CA, NY, IL?

I am. It's giving me a semi

After Farage it would be "Sell your NHS to us and give us access to sell our shitty food into your markets"

Lets scare them more by more power to the EU parliament and start federalising

And think long and hard if you have an economy on a similar scale as the UK

I am as puzzled as you but whatever the case it‘s fantastic comedy. I laughed at that punch line in the end.

Farage giveth, Farage taketh. -1984 or something.

I encourage you to stop buying almonds anyway lol

Not just that, we also need to aggressively combat our own far right. We need to tackle it in Hungary, we need to tackle it in all of Europe.

That means, improving livehoods for the proletariat that thinks itself "middle class" and "lower class". That means actual proper taxation of large companies. And that means actually combatting corruption!

Eh... you're being even more short sighted than Trump.

EU leaders are not children. They have plans that goes beyond who the current president is.

We've been Allies for a very long time. Exchanging technology, products and services. It's not as easy as just "cut them off". A lot of companies in EU have taken steps to become more independent in case of a major fallout with the US. But it's not exactly the thing you hear about on the news.

I can only speculate from what I know of my workplace. We are taking steps. But it takes time. We can't just stop all services and take a break for 5 years while we spend God knows how much money developing our own software and solutions.

We still need to keep a cash flow while we transition.

Because the EU has resisted the ultra-rich and the corporations in many ways recently (imposing rules, fining bad behavior) and the ultra rich just want to bully the world according to their whims which leads directly to the new attitudes in their party? Or could be the fact that russia also desperately wants the EU to be dead.

The republican party only serves the mega-rich and russian interests, so most of their actions can be explained by who gains from them, either mega-rich or russia.

The EU isn't letting them rape and pillage.

I see 3 possible reasons:
The continued existence of a free and democratic Europe could remind US citizens of what they once had and how much better they could be living, which makes the continued existence and success (fingers crossed) of the EU an existential threat to US conservatives.

Or maybe Putin + Xi consider the battle for the spite and minds of US Americans won and so they're now moving the focus of their troll armies + proxies to the EU. If all trolls suddenly get the same new talking points, that's not organic, that's a strategic shift mandated from the top.

And the 3rd reason I can think of is the combination of the above, which I think is most likely. And if the authoritarians fail at making the eu fail, they'll double down on displaying the eu countries as dystopian hellholes to convince their own population that they have it so much better.

The EU hasn't been compromised like the US federal government and at least, to some extent, still looks out for the interests of its citizens.

Conservatives and neoliberals only care about making rich people richer.

It's not conservatives, all actual conservatives understand now more than ever how needed the EU is. This is a coordinated attack on liberal democracy and the rule based world order coming from actors whose n.1 foreign policy objective is destroying them. Russia, China and Trump all have the same goal and that's undoing liberal democracy, or at the least rendering all liberal democracies useless.

Unfortunately, the dreams of the Russian elites for the West are becoming increasingly real since Brexit,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics

And now their vision aligns with that of the American elites in power.

Their reward was getting a poorer country.