What has been preoccupying the world in the past few weeks? The violations of a media institution and the terrorist attacks in Norway. What should have been preoccupying the world instead? The Eurozone crisis and the U.S. debt crisis; this is after I discount my personal opinion, so I do not say: the Arab revolutions as well. The Financial Times said, with regard to the ongoing global financial crisis, that the world is on the brink of an abyss. The Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve (i.e. the central bank) Ben Bernanke said that if the United States defaults on its debts, this would be a ‘financial disaster'. Then Italy's Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti, for his part, said that the European economy is like the Titanic, i.e. it is heading towards an economic ‘iceberg' from this or that country that will sink it down. In other words, there is a financial tsunami threatening to crush the value of the dollar and the euro, down to that of the Deutsche Mark between the two world wars, when a thief stole a woman's purse only to dump the Marks inside, fleeing with the purse. And yet the world, specifically the world media, is preoccupied with Rupert Murdoch's media's celebrity phone hacking scandal. True, the financial markets responded positively when the EU laid down its plan last week for rescuing the Greek economy, which included a bail-out package of 109 billion euros, with the banks contributing 37 billion euros over the period of 2011-2014, in addition to other items to stimulate growth and investment in Greece. But is this enough? We shall see. However, I remember that the EU's 17 member states had already dealt with the Greek crisis a year and a half ago, and it seems that their painkiller approach, instead of the surgical approach, had failed. Some of the sovereign debt figures in Europe are indeed scary. In Greece, the figure is 350 billion euros, or 143 percent of the GDP. In Italy it is 1.8 trillion euros, or 119 percent of the GDP, and in Belgium it is 97 percent, Ireland 96 percent, Portugal 93 percent, and 60 percent in Spain. Even France is in danger, with its debts standing at 80 percent of its GDP. Meanwhile, the U.S. economy alone represents one quarter of the world economy, and for this reason, we find that the U.S. debt stands at 14.3 trillion dollars, or the equivalent of its GDP. If President Obama fails to reach an agreement with Congress over the debt ceiling before the 2nd of August, the U.S. will default on its debts, making the crisis in Europe a ‘picnic' by comparison. I read that six senators in the U.S. Senate, deemed the Gang of Six, are attempting to expedite a deal between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, to raise the debt ceiling while approving 500 billion dollars in spending cuts immediately, and 3.7 trillion dollars over the next ten years. I also read that the President and Rep. John Boehner, Speaker of the House of Representatives, had inched close to a similar deal before the quarrel between them started. The Republican Representative, once again, wants to deny the poor social welfare and healthcare benefits, while maintaining tax breaks for the rich. If I am to translate the above into something that the readers can understand, I would say that the Republicans, or the War Party, want to destroy the American working class, without any reduction in defense expenditure, while the President wants to safeguard the welfare benefits and increase the treasury's revenues by abolishing the tax cuts for the rich that George W. Bush had approved. I am not certain that a solution will be reached in the United States before August 2. The gang of war still opposes cuts to the defense budget, which, in its declared part, amounts to 650 billion dollars, or more than all defense budgets around the world combined. The war gang, it seems, wants more wars that it can lose again. Perhaps the article written by one of the figures of the war gang, William Kristol, in his publication the Weekly Standard, the mouthpiece of the neocons, is a sufficient example of the extremism of the advocates of an American empire and the Israel lobby, and how they accuse others of what they themselves had perpetrated. Under the title “No More Taxes, No More Debt, No More Obama”, Kristol wrote the most insolent article I have read this year. He wants the tax cuts for the rich to be left in place, and at the same time, he wants the debt to be halted. In other words, he wants to eat the cake and have it too. He then insists that the Republican must do the right thing by their future by preventing Obama's reelection for a second term next year, accusing him of what the Republicans had perpetrated in front of the whole world in recent years. Such antagonism does not encourage optimism in the possibility of reaching a solution soon. And yet the world is preoccupied with Murdoch and yellow journalism, as it teeters on the brink of an economic abyss. [email protected]
