In the News April 8

Liberal/NDP Cartel Party Government Submits Federal War Budget

U.S. War Economy

U.S. President Biden has invoked the Defense Production Act of 1950 to strengthen the U.S. war economy using the central executive powers of the President to overcome any resistance of the people and local governments. He issued a “Memorandum for the Secretary of Defense” on March 31 stating, “It is the policy of my Administration that ensuring a robust, resilient, sustainable, and environmentally responsible domestic industrial base to meet the requirements of the clean energy economy, such as the production of large-capacity batteries, is essential to our national security and the development and preservation of domestic critical infrastructure.

“The United States depends on unreliable foreign sources for many of the strategic and critical materials necessary for the clean energy transition – such as lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite, and manganese for large-capacity batteries. Demand for such materials is projected to increase exponentially as the world transitions to a clean energy economy.

“To promote the national defense, the United States must secure a reliable and sustainable supply of such strategic and critical materials. The United States shall, to the extent consistent with the promotion of the national defense, secure the supply of such materials….”

With regard to the necessity of the Act to overcome resistance to certain mining and other industrial practices and to open the national treasury for private enterprise to engage in production with guarantees of maximum profit, Biden argues in the Memorandum, “Without Presidential action under section 303 of the Act, United States industry cannot reasonably be expected to provide the capability for these needed industrial resources, materials, or critical technology items in a timely manner.”

To this end, Biden invokes national security due to the challenge to U.S./NATO expansion into Russia where these critical minerals are found in abundance. This evokes memories of the original Act in 1950 at the beginning of the U.S. war of aggression against Korea which had the aim of seizing the Korean Peninsula to prepare for war against China and the Soviet Union, and to consolidate U.S. imperialism’s military occupation of Japan and Taiwan.

Biden writes in the Memorandum, “I find that action to expand the domestic production capabilities for such strategic and critical materials is necessary to avert an industrial resource or critical technology item shortfall that would severely impair the national defense capability. Therefore, I waive the requirements of section 303(a)(1)—(a)(6) of the Act for the purpose of expanding the sustainable and responsible domestic mining, beneficiation, and value-added processing of strategic and critical materials necessary for the production of large-capacity batteries for the automotive, e-mobility, and stationary storage sectors.”

The Act of 1950 specifically states, “The Act also authorizes the President to requisition property, force industry to expand production and the supply of basic resources, settle labor disputes, control consumer and real estate credit, establish contractual priorities, and allocate raw materials towards national defense.”

This Act applies to Canada as well, for the U.S. imperialists view Canada’s economy as integrated into the U.S. war economy and not foreign. The Biden decree underscores the determination of U.S. imperialism to secure U.S. and Canada’s critical minerals for its war economy, such as those in northern Ontario in the territories of Indigenous peoples. This implies as well that the central authorities using all means of the state will secure the delivery of those “critical minerals” through supply lines that brook no interference!

The people must denounce Biden’s invoking of the Act. The Act violates the rights of all, in particular the right to live in peace without war and the use of coercion and violence generally as a means to settle conflicts among countries and within them over disagreements of how to live and organize politics and to produce and distribute social wealth.

President Biden, through U.S./NATO pouring military equipment into Ukraine and egging on proxy forces to continue to fight and not negotiate a settlement acceptable to Russia and all the peoples of Ukraine, is repeating the refusal of the U.S. to negotiate an end to U.S. aggression in Korea through a peace treaty agreeable to Koreans. The situation today as it was in 1950 is dangerous and calls upon the peoples of North America to establish anti-war governments, make the continent a zone for peace, disband NATO and bring the troops home.

Video from a Reader

 

Video clip from Joe Biden’s Address to North American Building Trades Unions, April 6. This was sent by a reader with the note, “video shows Biden gloating about holding back & sabotaging human progress for absolutely no good reason what-so-ever. This rogue, parasite, pirate nation has to stop.”

Renewal Update, posted April 8, 2022.