RECRIMINATIONS over the failed US-Israeli war against Iran erupted in a heated shouting match between president Donald Trump and senior Republican senator, Bill Cassidy, at a Capitol Hill lunch shortly before a crucial Senate vote on Trump’s demand for $88 billion to pay Iran.
The heated row exploded – Senator Cassidy told reporters later – after Trump asked: ‘Why would anybody vote for the War Powers Act?’
‘Is that a rhetorical question, or would you like to really know?’ Cassidy retorted. The Senator defended his support for the War Powers Bill in the Senate which limited Trumps’s powers and demanded to know more about the Iran war and when it would end, but Trump ‘did not particularly care for my comments (and) raised his voice’ and tried to ‘demean’ me, he added.
Cassidy later told reporters: ‘The American people need to know more than we are being told. It does not appear – although I don’t know for sure – that the course of this is going the way that we were told.’
This rebellion developed ahead of Trump’s demands for $88 billion for Iran as part of the peace deal which now challenges the previously unwavering Republican Party support for Trump’s warmongering amid the raging US economic crisis with a national debt of $39 trillion dollars and its $900 billion annual interest payments.
The Senate voted by 50 to 47, largely along party lines, to block a war powers resolution that had advanced on a procedural vote in May.
Trump’s approval rating is now at its lowest since he returned to office last year. Just one in four Americans believes the war was worth its costs, a recent poll showed.
Elsewhere, the share values of the world’s stock markets plunged yesterday amid dire warnings from Chinese hedge funds that the speculative AI ‘super bubble’ is ready to burst.
Asian stock markets plunged overnight after Apple said it would increase prices by up to 25% because of AI costs and the shortage of computer chips.
Trading was briefly halted on South Korea’s main Kospi index when it sank by 5.8 per cent after suffering a 10 per cent correction, following comments by the US iPhone-maker that the AI boom had led to a shortage of memory chips.
Japan’s tech-heavy Nikkei dropped by 4.2 per cent, with stocks in Hong Kong and China also down heavily. The FTSE 100 and other European markets fell in early trading!
AI-linked shares were also hit on reports that ChatGPT-maker OpenAI could delay its much-anticipated trillion-dollar float until next year.
Technology giants have ploughed hundreds of billions into building AI infrastructure, sending demand for chips soaring. While chip stocks have surged, Apple’s price rises show that consumers will have to foot some of the bill for these huge investments in AI.
Meanwhile, two of China’s major hedge funds have warned that the boom in AI has turned into a bubble facing an imminent collapse.
Wealspring Asset, whose founder Yang Dong said that the top of the stock market was reached in 2007, added that AI stocks were forming a ‘super bubble’.
It told investors the ‘collapse point may not be far away’, according to Bloomberg News.
Meanwhile, fellow hedge fund Shanghai Banxia Investment Management Centre warned about the dramatic revenue growth of Claude chatbot developer Anthropic.
It said: ‘The trigger for the AI bubble to burst has already appeared.’
Shares of Apple slid 6.1 per cent overnight on Thursday after the tech giant announced price increases for iPads and MacBooks by 25 per cent to counter the surging cost of memory and storage chips.
That wiped about $263bn off of its market value. The vast unrepayable indebtedness of the world economy heralds the collapse of the global capitalist system It is now in its death agony! We must now go forward to world socialism!