US IMPERIALISM is currently stoking up a war crisis from Ukraine to the China Seas as it seeks a way out of its economic and political catastrophe through new wars, military interventions financed by massive ever-growing military spending.
Both the main US parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, are competing over just how vast the US spending on its military will be.
The Republicans have savaged President Biden’s decision to ‘slightly increase’ the Pentagon’s budget. Biden has spelt out that the US will increase the military budget by 1.7 per cent to $753 billion, an increase of $12.3 billion – this is still not enough for the Republican Party.
US Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has denounced Biden’s military budget, saying it doesn’t challenge China as it allegedly ‘aspires to overtake America as the world’s dominant superpower’.
Republican senators wrote in their letter: ‘President Biden’s budget proposal cuts defence spending, a terrible signal not only to our adversaries in Beijing and Moscow, but also to our allies and partners.’
In fact, in 2019, the United States spent more on national defence than China, India, Russia, Saudi Arabia, France, Germany, United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea, and Brazil – combined. That’s $732 billion to the American taxpayer. The other countries all together spent $726 billion.
Meanwhile, at home in America, highways are crumbling, city streets are choked with traffic, dams are falling apart, sewage treatment plants are overwhelmed, and antiquated water pipelines increasingly burst, as the US ruling class races for military domination.
However, the US ruling class is in fact becoming more isolated as its trusted confederates such as Israel, and the UK go deeper into economic and political crisis.
Thousands of Israeli protesters have rallied across the occupied territories to demand the resignation and imprisonment of under-siege Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu as well as the formation of a new cabinet after four inconclusive elections deepened the regime’s political crisis.
Protesters marched through the streets across Israel on Saturday evening, calling on politicians to unite against the long-serving premier and organise a new cabinet in order to prevent a possible fifth round of elections.
The main demonstrations were held outside Netanyahu’s official residence in the occupied Jerusalem al-Quds and his private home in the coastal city of Caesaria, with hundreds of protesters calling for a ‘change in government’, and demanding that the Prime Minister be imprisoned.
In a change from previous demonstrations, dozens of protesters gathered outside the home of Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, with clashes breaking out between police and the demonstrators after an attempt to hang a banner that read ‘Liar’ on the premises.
The Israeli regime is in a desperate crisis which cannot be resolved by more aggressive actions against the Palestinian masses, including building large numbers of new settlements.
The Israeli ‘Crime Minister’ group said in a statement that Rivlin gave Netanyahu the mandate ‘despite the majority of Israel’s citizens voting for the pro-change bloc’.
The head of another activist group in Israel added that the president ‘erred’ when he gave the ‘criminal defendant’ the opportunity to form a new cabinet. Netanyahu now has a maximum of 42 days to form a new cabinet before Rivlin picks another candidate or asks parliament to choose one.
In fact, the crisis of the capitalist system on a world scale is deepening by the minute from Myanmar with hundreds being butchered on a daily basis as civil war develops, to the Ukraine and Crimea.
The decision of the Turkish President Erdogan and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky to continue their ‘strategic partnership’, brings war with Russia closer.
There is only one way out of the rapidly deepening world crisis of capitalism and imperialism.
This is to build sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in every country to defend the gains of the Russian and Chinese revolutions by overthrowing capitalism in the US, the UK and throughout the EU.
This will create the conditions for the Chinese and Russian workers to bring back rule through Workers’ and Farmers’ Soviets, and also for the whole of humanity to move forward to the World Socialist Republic!
