ELON Musk’s chainsaw wielding stunt with Argentine President Javier Milei before a conservative convention in the US on Thursday was a call to war against US social programmes and whole government departments to ‘cut bureaucracy’, as Milei had done in Argentina.
Multi-billionaire Musk’s Department of Government efficiency is firing hundreds of thousands of government employees and freezing international aid.
‘Waste is pretty much everywhere,’ Musk claimed, while touting the work of his Department of Government efficiency cost-cutting initiative.
Elsewhere Musk has ramped up the US attacks on Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky accusing Kiev of being a ‘massive graft machine feeding off the dead bodies of Ukrainian soldiers’ and claimed Zelensky was ‘despised’ by his people.
Trump himself also accused Zelensky of starting the war, when he could have agreed a peace deal.
Musk wrote on X: ‘If Zelensky was actually loved by the people of Ukraine, he would hold an election. He knows he would lose in a landslide. So he cancelled the election. In reality, he is despised by the people of Ukraine.’
However, on Wednesday, Zelensky rejected US demands for a reported 50 per cent share of Ukraine’s rare earth minerals.
Any ‘land grab’ negotiations remain solely between the US and Russia, effectively excluding the EU and UK from profiting from the spoils of war. The war mongers are cutting each others throats.
After Trump’s declaration of ‘no US boots on the ground’ and that the EU and UK must increase defence spending to 5 per cent of GDP, plus the blanket imposition of US trade tariffs, Starmer rashly declared that the UK would send troops to confront Russia.
This was however contingent on a US ‘backstop’ in the form of US fighter jets in Poland and Romania supporting an EU-UK military peace-keeping course in the Ukraine.
The funding for this UK imperialist adventure will be gouged out of the UK working class with deeper cuts to public services, education and social benefits.
Yesterday British companies began their cuts campaign with reported job cuts at the fastest pace since the global financial crisis outside of Covid, according to the S&P Global PMI index.
Public sector borrowing, excluding banks, hit £118.2bn in the 10 months to January, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), £12.8bn higher than the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) forecasted.
Alex Kerr of Capital Economics added: ‘In order to meet her fiscal rules, the Chancellor will need to raise taxes and/or cut spending in the fiscal update on March 26.’
With inflation surging to 3 per cent, economic growth flat-lining, and borrowing costs soaring to £100 billion annually, the UK is already mired in a ‘stagflation’ crisis, and is so bankrupt that a major US investor with close links to Trump, James Fishbank, said this week that he would avoid investing in ‘backward’ Britain under Starmer.
Fishbank said his investment fund would only ever trade shares in British companies in order to bet against them. Traders who ‘short’ stocks do so in the hope they will make money when they fall in value.
‘You guys [the UK] are a totally backward country. We don’t want to be involved in that market one way or another. The only thing I would ever do is short British companies’ he said.
In fact, the toxic UK economy is so bankrupt it is seen as a pariah by international investors.
The only way forward for UK capitalism is to smash working class’ living standards and jobs and destroy the public sector and NHS!
It is to be war on Russia and a civil war at home – a real war on two fronts.
The TUC leaders remain completely silent on all this and the genocide in Palestine, and imperialism’s war on Russia, effectively, in practice, supporting Starmer’s attacks on the working class internationally and in the UK.
Workers must force the TUC to calls a general strike now to bring down the Starmer government and set up a workers’ government and socialism. This is the only way forward.