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America’s self-imposed debt limit is no more than a joke as Washington, the world’s richest debtor, can never satiate its unchecked spending appetite by unceasingly borrowing from overseas. Hence the recurring debt problem has become an incurable toxic addiction.
The United States, as the world’s largest economy whose currency still holds a dominant position globally, thus has an unshirkable responsibility to fix its debt problem in a responsible fashion.
But each time its debt addiction strikes, America’s nasty domestic partisan politics and debt brinksmanship will uniformly make matters worse, sending shockwaves across the global markets and putting the whole world on tenterhooks. The ongoing crisis is no exception.
After months of political tug-of-war, U.S. President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy reached an agreement on Sunday on raising the debt ceiling. If approved by the U.S. Congress later this week, it would be the 103rd time the country raises its debt limit in the post-war era.
While the deal may have for the moment helped the country avert a destructive debt default, and allow the world to breathe a sigh of relief, America’s deep-seated debt problem remains unsolved and is always ready to come back and haunt the world some day.
America’s national debt clock is ticking. The swelling debt, more than 31.4 trillion U.S. dollars now, is a credibility challenge for the world. Facing the skyrocketing numbers, nations across the globe have become increasingly anxious about the United States’ ability to repay its bills in the long run.
The greenback is the most commonly held reserve currency, making up more than 60 percent of global foreign exchange reserves. Theoretically, the United States, with its dollar supremacy, can continue to issue new bonds to pay off the old debts as long as its government revenues can cover the interest payments. However, that is highly unsustainable.
The ratio of government debt in gross domestic product (GDP) is an important indicator of a country’s ability to settle its debts. The U.S. Congressional Budget Office predicts that the proportion will reach 185 percent in 2052. And by 2053, net interest will consume approximately 7.2 percent of America’s GDP — nearly 40 percent of federal revenues. Such a trajectory will cause more serious concerns for the viability of U.S. debts and the dollar’s real purchasing power, creating mounting uncertainties in the world market.
The U.S. debts, with an ever shrinking credibility, have become a major source of risks in the global financial market.
For a long time, U.S. treasuries have been considered as so-called “safe haven assets.” However, the U.S. fiscal and monetary authorities have merely focused on America’s own policy goals, forcing drastic dollar fluctuations and distorting economic cycles, which causes a serious spillover into the financial sector.
Take the fall of the Silicon Valley Bank. On the surface, the bank suffered a devastating run on deposits because of a liquidity crisis. Yet the real reason is that the value of assets that the bank had bought during the low-rate cycle plunged due to the Federal Reserve’s aggressive hike of interest rates.
Since March last year, the Fed has raised interest rates 10 times in a row in an effort to curb inflation. Total book losses on bonds held by all U.S. banks ballooned to about 620 billion dollars at the end of 2022, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
If the United States continues to kick its debt can down the road, the cyclical debt crisis will threaten global financial security and the viability of the global economy over the long haul. Everyone knows that it is a dire problem, yet nothing substantial has ever been done about it. That’s what people call a “grey rhino.”
It is true that the White House and the U.S. Congress over the years can always come up with some sort of temporary solutions to the debt ceiling. Yet considering the country’s chronically polarized political environment, compromises are not always guaranteed and defaults not completely avoidable. If a U.S. default does happen, it could trigger a recession in America, and take a heavy toll on the world economy, many analysts worldwide have concurred.
Solving America’s debt problem demands a systemic and long-term approach. Such sensible solutions for America to wean itself off its debt addiction include curbing the country’s already behemoth and still rising military expenditures, ending the economy’s over-financialization and refraining from abusing extreme monetary policies like quantitative easing, among others.
Yet politicians from both parties have proven short-sighted and dangerously irresponsible. This is a genuine reflection of the country’s dysfunctional political system.
“In my eyes, we’re playing Russian roulette with the United States’ credit,” Jeff Tomasulo, CEO of Vespula Capital Management and Tactical Income, said.
The United States insists on assuming leadership in many areas yet neglects to accept responsibility when things go wrong. America must acknowledge that its debt crisis extends beyond its borders. Ignoring that reality is a price too heavy to pay in this age of global economic interdependence.
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On May 15, 2023, Berkshire Hathaway reported in a Form 13F filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that it had completed the sale of its $4 billion stake in Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC). This sale completed a process that began in February 2023, when Berkshire Hathaway announced that it sold 86 percent of its holdings in TSMC. In April, Berkshire Hathaway’s leader Warren Buffett told Nikkei that the geopolitical tension between the United States and China was “certainly a consideration” in his decision to divest from TSMC. TSMC told Nikkei, is a “well-managed company” but that Berkshire Hathaway would find other places for its capital. At his May 6 morning meeting, Buffett said that TSMC “is one of the best-managed companies and important companies in the world, and you’ll be able to say the same thing five, ten or twenty years from now. I don’t like its location and reevaluated that.” By “location,” Buffett meant Taiwan, in the context of the threats made by the United States against China. He decided to wind down his investment in TSMC “in the light of certain things that were going on.” Buffett announced that he would move some of this capital towards the building of a fledgling U.S. domestic semiconductor industry.
TSMC, based in Hsinchu, Taiwan,, is the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturer. In 2022, it accounted for 56 percent of the share of the global market and over 90 percent of advanced chip manufacturing. Warren Buffett’s investment in TSMC was based on the Taiwanese company’s immense grip on the world semiconductor market. In August 2022, U.S. President Biden signed the CHIPS and Science Act into law, which will provide $280 billion to fund semiconductor manufacturing inside the United States. On December 6, 2022, Biden joined TSMC’s Chairman Dr. Mark Liu at the $40 billion expansion of TSMC’s semiconductor factories in North Phoenix, Arizona. Dr. Liu said at the project’s announcement that the second TSMC factory is “a testimony that TSMC is also taking a giant step forward to help build a vibrant semiconductor ecosystem in the United States.”
The first TSMC plant will open in 2024 and the second, which was announced in December, will open in 2026. On February 22, 2023, the New York Times ran a long article (“Inside Taiwanese Chip Giant, a U.S. Expansion Stokes Tensions”), which pointed out—based on interviews with TSMC employees—that “high costs and managerial challenges” show “how difficult it is to transplant one of the most complicated manufacturing processes known to man halfway across the world.” At the December 6 announcement, Biden said, “American manufacturing is back,” but it is only back at a much higher cost (the plant’s construction cost is ten times more than it would have cost in Taiwan). “The most difficult thing about wafer manufacturing is not technology,” Wayne Chiu—an engineer who left TSMC in 2022—told the New York Times. “The most difficult thing is personnel management. Americans are the worst at this because Americans are the most difficult to manage.”
Blow up Taiwan
U.S. Ambassador Robert O’Brien, the former National Security Advisor of Donald Trump, told Steve Clemons, an editor at Semafor, at the Global Security Forum in Doha, Qatar, on March 13, 2023, “The United States and its allies are never going to let those [semiconductor] factories fall into Chinese hands.” China, O’Brien said, could build “the new OPEC of silicon chips” and thereby, “control the world economy.” The United States will prevent this possibility, he said, even if it means a military strike. On May 2, 2023, at a Milken Institute event, U.S. Congressman Seth Moulton said that if Chinese forces move into Taiwan, “we will blow up TSMC. … Of course, the Taiwanese really don’t like this idea.”
These outlandish statements by O’Brien and Moulton have a basis in a widely circulated paper from the U.S. Army War College, published in November 2021, by Jared M. McKinney and Peter Harris (“Broken Nest: Deterring China from Invading Taiwan”). “The United States and Taiwan should lay plans for a targeted scorched-earth strategy that would render Taiwan not just unattractive if ever seized by force, but positively costly to maintain. This could be done effectively by threatening to destroy facilities belonging to the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company,” they write.
Right after Moulton made these incendiary remarks, former U.S. defense undersecretary Michèle Flournoy said that it was a “terrible idea” and that such an attack would have a “$2 trillion impact on the global economy within the first year and you put manufacturing around the world at a standstill.”
Taiwan’s officials responded swiftly to Moulton, with minister of defense Chiu Kuo-cheng asking, “How can our national army tolerate this situation if he says he wants to bomb this or that?” While Chiu responded to Moulton’s statement about a military strike on TSMC, in fact, the U.S. government has already attacked the ability of this Taiwanese company to remain in Taiwan.
Taiwan’s economics vice minister Lin Chuan-neng said in response to these threats and Buffett’s sale of TSMC that his government “will do its utmost to let the world know that Taiwan is stable and safe.” These incendiary remarks aimed at China now threaten the collapse of Taiwan’s economy.
Made in Japan
In his May 6 meeting, Warren Buffett said something that gives a clue about where the semiconductor manufacturing might be diverted. “I feel better about the capital that we’ve got deployed in Japan than Taiwan,” he said. In 1988, 51 percent of the world’s semiconductors were made in Japan, but as of 2022, the number is merely 9 percent. In June 2022, Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI) announced it would put in 40 percent of a planned $8.6 billion for a semiconductor manufacturing plant by TSMC in Kumamoto. METI said in November that it has selected the Rapidus Corporation—which includes a stake by NTT, SoftBank, Sony, and Toyota—to manufacture next-generation 2-nanometer chips. It is likely that Berkshire Hathaway will invest in this new business.
Source: Globetrotter
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U.S. President Joe Biden will not travel to Papua New Guinea and Australia later this month as originally planned due to the ongoing stalemate in negotiations with congressional leaders to address the debt ceiling, multiple U.S. media outlets reported Tuesday, citing sources familiar with the matter.
Biden would have become the first sitting U.S. president to visit the Pacific island country of Papua New Guinea, to be followed by a trip to Sydney for the leaders’ summit of the Quad, which includes the United States, Japan, India and Australia.
Biden will still go to Hiroshima, Japan, to participate in the three-day Group of Seven (G7) summit beginning Friday.
Earlier in the day, John Kirby, the National Security Council’s coordinator for strategic communications, told the regular White House press briefing that the White House was “reevaluating” the post-Japan part of Biden’s trip.
“What I can speak to is the G7 and going to Hiroshima. The president is looking forward to that. We are taking a look at the rest of the trip,” Kirby told reporters.
News of the shortening of the presidential overseas trip came as Biden was meeting with congressional leaders from both the Democratic and Republican parties in the Oval Office over the debt ceiling issue.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen reaffirmed Monday that the United States may default on its debt obligations as soon as June 1 if the partisan fight drags on without a settlement.
Biden will depart Washington on Wednesday, stopping over Anchorage, Alaska, before arriving in Japan on Thursday, according to the travel guidance announced previously by the White House.
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The recent U.S. Census Bureau data suggest that the U.S. merchandise trade deficit with China was larger in 2022 than when Donald Trump was president, said an article on the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace website.
Adding that America’s overall trade deficit hit an all-time high of 1.18 trillion U.S. dollars, Carnegie noted that this fortifies the view that “tariffs would not reduce U.S. trade deficits and the costs would be paid largely by Americans.”
Similarly, the Financial Times recently commented on “waging war on trade,” describing the current U.S. approach as “a negative-sum game” and stressing that politicizing trade will surely lead to wasteful outcomes.
The slowdown in world trade, the article’s author Martin Wolf wrote, the shift towards economic nationalism, and the growing demands in the West for decoupling from China “are reshaping the global economy.”
In recent years, the U.S. bullying trading tactics have caused an increase in costs for international companies, a decrease in their competitiveness, and harm the interests of consumers.
Statistics show that the previous U.S. government has implemented over 3,900 sanctions, which is an average of three sanctions per day. The Biden administration has also announced a “Buy American” rule, requiring any goods purchased with taxpayer money to contain 75 percent American-made content.
Despite what appears to be a periodic implementation of protectionist and unilateral policies, American firms are reluctant to undertake such a shift, which could undermine their prospects in the global economy, said Rahim Teymoori, a researcher at the Development and Foresight Research Center of the Plan and Budget Organization of Iran.
“Although such economic policies would, in the short term, possibly contribute to the U.S. production sector on the back of the government’s financial support and protection, they, in the long run, would harm the U.S. companies’ competitiveness as they would lose a big integrated market, in which their connections have been formed,” he said.
Domestically, Washington’s trade war have caused sweeping losses borne by ordinary people. Worldwide, U.S. protectionist policies can lead to disordered supply chains, severe inflation shocks, and an increase in living costs.
The United States is not only restricting its companies’ overseas economic activities, escalating export controls, and introducing the Chips and Science Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to protect its interests, but also coercing other countries into joining the sanctions and forcing others to do things that are not good for themselves, said a Japanese researcher, noting that “this is an act of the mafia.”
Kiyoyuki Seguchi, research director at Japan’s Canon Institute for Global Studies, said that the U.S. export restrictions on semiconductors have affected companies in Japan, South Korea, the Netherlands and other countries, and even the United States itself.
In Seguchi’s opinion, the U.S. adoption of a zero-sum economics policy cannot succeed in the real economic field because “the logic in economic relations is that either win-win or lose-lose, there can be no result where one side wins and the other loses.”
Partly due to U.S. trade protectionism and the spillover effects of previous monetary and fiscal policies, global inflation has risen to a 40-year high and more than 60 percent of low-income developing countries are in debt trouble.
While the Trump administration had tried to bring profits and dividends to the country by imposing tariffs on multinational products, the Biden administration continued with this industrial policy of incentives, fueling high inflation and making the whole world bear the consequences, said Hsia Hua Sheng, an economist at the University of Sao Paulo.
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U.S. President Joe Biden has warned of the dire consequences of a possible default by the U.S. government on its debt obligation as early as June 1.
Speaking at SUNY Westchester Community College in New York on Wednesday, Biden said the U.S. economy would fall into recession with 8 million Americans losing their jobs, and its international reputation would be damaged in the extreme in the case of a debt default.
“If we default on our debt, the whole world is in trouble,” said Biden.
Americans would face higher interest rates for credit cards, car loans, mortgages and payments for social security, Medicare, troops, and veterans could all be halted or delayed, said Biden.
Biden, a moderate Democrat, blamed the so-called MAGA Republicans in the Congress for the “manufactured crisis,” saying there’s no question about U.S. ability to pay its bills.
Biden and Congressional leaders are set to meet again on Friday to negotiate a budget for fiscal year 2024, which is intertwined with the debt ceiling issue.
The first meeting between Biden and four Congressional leaders on Tuesday failed to generate meaningful breakthroughs.
The Democrats and Republicans are still jockeying for position prior to an anticipated intense showdown in the coming weeks.
In January, the United States hit its 31.4-trillion-U.S.-dollar debt limit, set in December 2021, prompting the Treasury Department to use accounting maneuvers known as “extraordinary measures” to keep the government paying its bills, such as curbing certain government investments.
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by Walter Smolarek
This year’s May Day celebration in Cuba was interrupted by severe storms that knocked out electricity in much of the country. Authorities had no choice but to postpone the traditional mass marches. But for over 150 young grassroots organizers from the United States who had traveled to the country to mark the holiday, this turn of events was just more reason to deepen their efforts to end the U.S.-imposed blockade of the country.
Miya Tada, a brigade participant from New York, explained how this showed that “the biggest obstacle the Cuban people are facing is the repression and economic warfare of our own government, and that just inspires me to further the struggle against the blockade back in the United States.”
This wide range of activists from nearly 30 states and dozens of organizations was brought together by the International Peoples’ Assembly, a network of left movements and parties around the globe. Members of the solidarity brigade had spent the preceding week taking part in educational panels, discussions with Cuban activists, and youth exchanges as they sought to deepen their understanding of the Cuban Revolution.
May Day Amid a Tightening Blockade
The country is currently grappling with a range of severe difficulties that boil down to a single tremendous challenge—surviving amid a blockade that seems to tighten every day. The U.S.-imposed blockade has been in effect for over six decades, but a series of developments in the past several years has taken its cruelty to new heights.
The COVID-19 pandemic caused havoc in every country on the planet, but the coercive measures on Cuba magnified the crisis dramatically there. The country was able to avoid the kind of catastrophic loss of life experienced in the United States thanks to its world-renowned health system that produced five different vaccines, but the economic consequences were grave. Tourism is a principal source of foreign currency—essential to import vital goods since Cuba is locked out of the dollar-dominated world market—but this industry effectively disappeared overnight. Many other sectors of the economy were severely impacted as well.
“The other pandemic we faced,” Dr. Damodar Peña Pentón of the Latin American School of Medicine explained to brigade members earlier in the trip, “was the administration of Donald Trump. He imposed 243 new measures and used COVID-19 as an ally.”
Over the course of the Trump administration, the mild thaw in U.S.-Cuba relations that took place at the end of the Obama years was completely reversed. Aiming to suffocate the revolution, Trump imposed 243 new restrictions on Cuba designed to totally isolate it from the world economy.
Towards the end of his term, the State Department officially labeled Cuba a “state sponsor of terrorism”—because it had hosted successful peace talks between the Colombian government and the rebel movement FARC! Colombia’s president at the time was celebrated for his efforts with a Nobel Peace Prize, but Cuba’s reward was to be slandered as terrorists in an effort to further deter potential trading partners. This is a prime example of what Johana Tablada, Deputy Director for U.S. Affairs at the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told brigade members the prior week: “The U.S. government has been permanently telling lies to justify its policy.”
Last August, a massive inferno broke out at the country’s main fuel storage facility in the province of Matanzas. A lightning strike sparked a fire that exploded one of the facility’s massive tanks and then spread to three more. Fourteen firefighters tragically died as they heroically battled the blaze.
Such a disaster would badly affect any country, but for Cuba, the blockade had already made it extraordinarily hard to meet its energy needs. Severe fuel shortages ensued, which persist to this day. This disrupts daily life in innumerable ways and makes it extremely difficult to respond to situations like the storm on the eve of May Day.
Just a few weeks after the fire, on September 27th, Hurricane Ian made landfall in the western province of Pinar del Río. The powerful storm destroyed over 50,000 homes and damaged 60 percent of the housing in the province. Construction materials desperately needed for reconstruction efforts could not be imported due to the economic siege of the island.
Ian also had a profound effect on agriculture. Pinar del Río is known for its tobacco production, and Cuba’s cigars are an important way to acquire foreign currency through exports. Food crops being grown in the region were almost totally destroyed.
The cumulative effect of all this was to create an economic crisis that—contrary to the presentation in the major corporate media outlets—is the consequence of the limitless cruelty of the U.S. government, not a failure of socialism.
The United States seeks to cover up this criminal behavior by preventing its own citizens from traveling to Cuba to see the reality firsthand. Despite traveling as part of a licensed, completely legal trip, members of the youth brigade were harassed and held in secondary questioning upon their return home at the Miami and Newark airports. Several young activists had their phones wrongfully searched and seized in a blatant violation of their civil liberties.
Moving Forward Despite Great Obstacles
The slogan of this year’s May Day in Cuba was “Hands and Hearts for the Homeland!” It reflects the urgent need for every Cuban to contribute all their abilities to overcome any challenge.
Any easing of U.S. pressure on the country will be an immense relief as they pursue this task. The blockade of the country has been almost unanimously condemned at the United Nations on an annual basis for three decades. But even short of the full lifting of the blockade, steps like the revocation of the 243 Trump-imposed measures or the outrageous designation by the State Department that Cuba is a “state sponsor of terrorism” would improve the situation greatly.
“Being here in Cuba has opened my eyes to the dire need in the United States to raise awareness about what’s going on with this blockade and to end it,” explained brigade member Sarah Brummet of Pensacola, Florida. “I’m very inspired to see the solidarity and the struggle of the Cuban people, and it’s our responsibility to take that same energy home and fight the blockade,” she said.
Author Bio: This article was produced in partnership by Peoples Dispatch and Globetrotter. Walter Smolarek is a Philadelphia-based journalist and activist, covering both political developments inside the United States as well as the international activities of U.S. imperialism. Since becoming involved in the movement against the Iraq War as a high school student, he has also participated as an organizer in social movements ranging from Occupy Wall Street in 2011 to the 2014-2015 wave of the Black Lives Matter movement and ongoing mutual aid relief efforts in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. He is a contributor to BreakThrough News, currently serves as the editor of Liberation newspaper, and is the managing editor of LiberationNews.org.
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United Parcel Service (UPS) workers are gearing up for a potential strike as they hold contract negotiations with the company. Talks between the company and the union representing UPS workers, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, opened on April 17. Teamsters President Sean O’Brien says that workers are ready to walk off the job if UPS fails to reach a deal on a strong contract before the current one expires on July 31.
Workers are demanding better pay, more full-time work, better job security, and an end to the two-tier “22.4” job classification. The deeply unpopular “22.4” provision creates a lower-paid tier of workers who essentially perform the same work as senior drivers, but receive lower pay.
The workers are also demanding an end to excessive overtime, better protections against company harassment, the elimination of driver-facing cameras, and protection from hot weather. Drivers reported extreme temperatures inside their delivery trucks in posts that went viral last summer, and workers, like 24-year-old Esteban Chavez Jr., have died due to extreme heat.
A strike may have a formidable impact. UPS workers move 6 percent of U.S. GDP every day. The last time UPS Teamsters went on strike was in 1997 when 185,000 workers walked off the job in one of the largest strikes in U.S. history. The work stoppage cost the company $850 million despite only lasting for 15 days. There has been no larger work stoppage in the US since then.
from the Peoples Dispatch / Globetrotter News Service
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(Xinhua) — The United States is notorious for its cyber record. Just ask the National Security Agency (NSA), which in 2013 suffered the biggest leak in its history when Edward Snowden, a former CIA contractor, walked out with a vast trove of secret documents.
Snowden disclosed to the press details of extensive internet and phone surveillance by American intelligence. As the scandal widened, multiple media outlets revealed that NSA tapped directly into the servers of internet firms to track online communication in a surveillance program known as Prism.
A decade later, it’s the Pentagon in the limelight this time. A set of highly classified documents from the department were leaked online in recent weeks, in an apparent security breach that revealed U.S. intelligence gathering on some of its key allies. South Korea, one of those affected, has played down any possibility of tension, reiterating its “strong” ties with America.
Those documents also reportedly include military assessments on the Ukraine crisis and CIA reports on a range of global issues. The embarrassing leak has endangered intelligence methods, exposed American strategy and undermined trust among U.S. allies, CNBC quoted former defense department officials and intelligence experts as saying.
SURVEILLANCE OBSESSION
For years, Washington has been spying on the world through electronic eavesdropping and communication interception, with the targets ranging from what it called “strategic competitors” to its European partners.
Anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks in 2015 released a trove of documents titled “Target Tokyo” detailing systematic mass surveillance the agency undertook of Japanese politicians, ministries and corporations over a number of years.
According to the documents, America had gleaned intimate details of internal Japanese deliberations on trade-related issues, including agricultural imports and trade disputes and positions.
European leaders should not be surprised, either. The Danish state broadcaster DR reported in 2021 that the NSA used a partnership with Denmark’s foreign intelligence unit to spy on senior officials of neighbouring countries, including then German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The findings are the result of a 2015 internal investigation in the Danish Defence Intelligence Service into NSA’s role in the partnership, DR said.
According to the investigation, which covered the period from 2012 to 2014, the NSA used Danish information cables to spy on senior officials in Sweden, Norway, France and Germany.
China has been a target too. In September 2022, China’s National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center and cybersecurity company 360 respectively released investigation reports on the NSA attacks on China’s Northwestern Polytechnical University with aeronautics and space research programs. The reports indicated that the agency’s Tailored Access Operations unit mounted hundreds of thousands malicious cyberattacks targeting Chinese objectives.
“NO RULES”
The United States is sparing no effort to militarize cyberspace, develop offensive cyber capabilities, and create systematic cyberattack platforms. In 2017, cyberspace was officially listed alongside the sea, land, air, and space as the “fifth domain” of the U.S. military.
The aim is thinly veiled: to maintain America’s hegemony. Analysts say that cyber warfare is one of the tools used in its “hybrid warfare.” Like economic sanctions, terrorist activities, psychological warfare, and military actions, it is a means by which the United States interferes in other countries and achieves its own political goals.
In seeking its own absolute security, the United States flagrantly violates the sovereignty of other countries’ cyberspace and undermines their information security. This seriously hinders the efforts of the international community to maintain cybersecurity and data security, disrupts the international order in cyberspace, and undermines global strategic stability.
Andrey Krutskikh, former director of the Department of International Information Security at the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said that the United States and other Western countries are militarizing cyberspace, attempting to turn it into a stage for interstate confrontation, which exacerbates the risk of direct military conflict and can lead to unpredictable consequences.
Speaking of “Target Tokyo,” Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, said the revelations should not come as a surprise, given the track record of the United States as a global surveillance superpower.
“In these documents we see the Japanese government worrying in private how much or how little to tell the United States, in order to prevent undermining of its climate change proposal or its diplomatic relationship,” Assange said in a statement.
“And yet we now know that the United States heard everything and read everything, and was passing around the deliberations of Japanese leadership to Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK. The lesson for Japan is this: do not expect a global surveillance superpower to act with honor and respect. There is only one rule: there are no rules.”
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The world’s total military expenditure surpassed $2.24 trillion in 2022, with Europe recording its steepest rise in the last three decades, according to the annual military expenditure report of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). The report was published on April 24.
The annual report notes that global military expenditure rose by 3.7 percent last year. 2022 was the eighth consecutive year of increasing global defense spending.
The U.S. remains by far the largest global spender with a military expenditure of over $877 billion in 2022—three times more than the second largest spender, China, which spent $292 billion. $19.9 billion of the U.S. military expenditure was military aid to Ukraine.
The U.S. and its NATO allies have been the primary reason for the rising military expenditure and weaponization in the world.
The U.S. alone accounts for 39 percent of the world’s total military expenditure. This is more than the total military expenditure of the rest of the top 10 military spenders, including China, Russia, and India. According to a SIPRI press release, the 31 NATO members together spent over $1.23 trillion—more than half of the world’s total military expenditure in 2022.
from the Peoples Dispatch / Globetrotter News Service
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Following excerpts adapted from the editorial published in New York Post
Who announces a presidential campaign at dawn?
Joe Biden’s early-morning video was as vacuous as his 2020 basement campaign — and no doubt the one he plans for 2024.
The endless quick cuts and zippy soundtrack made it look like an appeal to the TikTok generation, except the narrator at 80 could barely get his words out (and how many takes did even that require?).
And that was when he wasn’t doing his weird “near-whisper to show I really mean it” schtick.
Specifics? We’ll get to the outright lies, but generally it was a vagueness about “freedom” and “rights.” In 2020, Donald Trump was the direct threat; now it is a horde of “MAGA extremists” who’re endangering the nation’s very soul that only SuperJoe can save.
From his bunker? Or from the vacations where he’s spent a quarter of his presidency?
Without naming a single achievement (which would, after all, be tough), he ends by vowing to “finish the job.”
But what job? Ruining the country completely?
He’s already set record lows for facing the press, because his aides (rightly!) fear he’ll say something disastrous if allowed to go off-script.
His constant gaffes, garbled speech, mistruths, and ever-fading link with reality have only confirmed that he’s not fit to be the leader of the free world.
He bizarrely, falsely claims to know what it’s like to have had “a house burn down with my wife in it” and to have been arrested as a civil-rights activist.
He was raised in practically every racial or ethnic community there is.
His bigger lies are worse: His botched Afghanistan pullout was an unprecedented “success.”
Inflation would be temporary.
The crisis at the border was merely seasonal.
Biden lies to himself, too: He actually thinks he’s done a great job and the nation needs him to save it from Donald Trump — though Trump is likely the only GOP foe he can beat.
He’ll never admit his age disqualifies him.
And his handlers won’t, either, because they’re happily wielding the real power.
Americans see the problem: Some 70% of them, including more than half of Democrats, don’t want him to run per last month’s Yahoo News/YouGov poll (and matching every other poll).
In February, an AP-NORC poll found just 12% of Democrats thought Biden should be the party’s leader.
And 59% called him “too old to work in government,” per Reuters/Ipsos.
Yet this seemingly senile, ethically challenged octogenarian with a disastrous record and a horrific 54% disapproval rating is likely the best Dems can field.
As Rich Lowry notes, Biden’s general fecklessness makes him seem unthreatening — and thus excellent cover for his administration’s insanely left-wing policies.
So the party’s clearing the way for him, rearranging the primaries to avoid a dangerous surprise in Iowa or New Hampshire and so far not even scheduling any Democratic debates.
Yes, he’s so weak that mystic Marianne Williamson or crank RFK Jr. could show him up.
The “Weekend at Bernie’s” campaign is officially underway.
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