Miscellaneous News

vincent said:

I remember she made up shit about China.

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US looking at currency manipulation in tariff debate, Treasury chief says​

WASHINGTON, Feb 14 (Reuters) - The Trump administration is looking beyond tariffs and non-tariff barriers to examine currency manipulation as it studies the issue ahead of an April deadline, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Friday.

"We're also looking at currency manipulation," Bessent said in an interview on Fox Business Network. "The U.S. has a strong dollar policy, but because we have a strong dollar policy, it doesn't mean that other countries get to have a weak currency policy."

On Thursday, Republican U.S. President Donald Trump directed his economic team to develop plans for reciprocal tariffs on every country that taxes U.S. imports, raising the risk of a global trade war.

Trump's memo stopped short of imposing more tariffs, but ordered his administration to calculate duties to match those other countries charge and to counteract non-tariff barriers by April 1.

"We're going to come up with what is the equivalent of ... what I would call a reciprocal index: country by country, the outstanding tariffs, non-tariff, the trade barriers and currency manipulation," Bessent told FBN.

Trump's planned tariffs could be very substantial if other countries did not reduce their tariffs, he added, with the ultimate tariff policies dependant on how trading partners respond.

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"The U.S. has a strong dollar policy, but because we have a strong dollar policy, it doesn't mean that other countries get to have a weak currency policy."

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Lethe said:

The complaints from Europe about Trump's approach to Ukraine are rather strange. After all, each and every European nation can execute its own sovereign foreign policy, including in relation to matters of war and peace. Each and every European nation is likewise free to fund as much or as little in the way of military capability as it chooses, and to support Ukraine as much or as little as it chooses, including with air strikes, naval action or troop deployments. While the capacities of smaller nations remain inherently limited, at least the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Poland can individually choose to match or exceed the modest American commitment to Ukraine, and their failure to do so is a choice that each of those nations has made each day for several years now. Despite their rhetoric, evidently none of these nations have thought it worth placing their nations on a war footing with defence expenditures at 10% of GDP or greater, with corresponding disruptions to social and economic life elsewhere. Rather, each of these nations (in common with both the USA and, to a lesser extent, Russia itself) have sought to manage this conflict such that the impact on the home front remains minimal to nonexistent. It's almost as if none of this is particularly serious, except for Ukraine. Trump's attitude towards Ukraine only matters because European nations have chosen not to step up to the degree required to shape outcomes.

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coolgod said:

Wang Yi's meetings in Munich

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1890491291550793891

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1890454350113239320

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https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1890440577625256017

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martinwagner said:

Why are all of these pro-imperialist females born with horse faces?

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martinwagner said:

Why are all of these pro-imperialist females born with horse faces?

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Pentagon Prepares Lists of Potential Cuts for DOGE​

WASHINGTON—In a bid to get ahead of what could be drastic cuts by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, some parts of the military are preparing lists of weapons they have long wanted to cancel but couldn’t get past lawmakers seeking to protect spending in their districts.

DOGE members are expected at the Defense Department as soon as Friday, defense officials said. The Pentagon has received a list of DOGE officials assigned to the department but hasn’t publicly released it, they added.

“We welcome DOGE to the Pentagon,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said earlier this week.

In the weeks since President Trump took office, DOGE staffers have been embedded at several federal agencies, reviewing government systems to look for excessive spending. Trump signed an executive order Tuesday giving DOGE more authority to reduce the size of the federal workforce.

But DOGE has yet to tackle a budget as large and complex as the Defense Department’s. The department employs three million troops and civilians and has a budget in excess of $800 billion, accounting for at least 12% of the $6.75 trillion federal budget.

Military spending on bases as well as money for weapons systems, ships and vehicles is the cornerstone of local economies around the country, and often large military weapons are built across several states. For example, construction of the F-35 touches 48 states.

By comparison, the U.S. Agency for International Development, which DOGE effectively gutted, had a $40 billion budget and employed 10,000 personnel.

DOGE didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Some military services have already drawn up their own wish lists of cuts. “People are offering up things sacrificially, hoping that will prevent more cuts,” one defense official said.

The Army list includes outdated drones and vehicles that have been produced in surplus and, if cut, could add up to billions of dollars in savings.

“We’re taking a proactive approach to making our spending more efficient,” said Col. Dave Butler, an Army spokesman. “There are several systems that we know won’t survive on the modern battlefield.”

The U.S. Navy is proposing cuts to its frigates and littoral combat ships, people familiar with the plans said.

The Air Force declined to comment on any proposed cuts, but Musk in the past has taken aim at the service’s F-35 stealth jet fighters. Musk has called the program, whose total costs are expected to exceed $2 trillion over several decades, a “flop” and its builders “idiots.”

In the past, the services put forth lists of potential cuts in a bid to shift funding toward newer programs they wanted to fund instead. Such lists were often regarded as a political ploy meant to suggest the services were underfunded.
Lawmakers who sought to preserve military spending in their districts would then routinely reject those proposed cuts. The result has been a steadily growing Pentagon budget since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

“It was in the permissive post-9/11 environment that we saw a whole slew of ill-conceived weapons programs,” said Dan Grazier, senior fellow and director of the National Security Reform Program at the Stimson Center, a Washington nonprofit. “Now we are seeing the results—failed program after failed program.”

But with DOGE promising to make major cuts, some services are revamping the list to get ahead of the process.
“They want to inoculate themselves. The services are looking at this as an opportunity to get rid of things they couldn’t before because of constituencies,” said Bryan Clark, senior fellow at Hudson Institute, who closely tracks the U.S. Navy budget.

There is room for major cost savings without dramatically affecting the department because it is so big, Clark said, but until now cuts came at a political cost.

“There is a different mindset now where the administration is willing to make cuts that will upset constituencies,” he said. “You are going to upset a lot of companies who have built their business around government funding, and the new administration is not worried about the reaction it will get from the Hill.”

Defense spending has been cut in the past, particularly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the 1990s, the U.S. sought to shrink or close military bases, but the costs of doing so were far higher than expected in the short term and devastated some local economies.

Because much of what the Pentagon operates is on classified systems and accessing them requires security clearances, navigating defense systems may also prove difficult, particularly compared with USAID.

“There are classified systems in the Pentagon that others do not have, and they are classified at different levels, and so some of those are going to be much more difficult and much more sensitive to oversight for someone that may not have an appropriate classification,” said Sen. Mike Rounds, (R., S.D.), who supports Musk’s efforts.

One place where there could be a target of cuts is at headquarters units, particularly at the Pentagon. The potential for layoffs at the Pentagon, whose hallways feature large posters with messages like “Loose lips sink ships,” has sparked trepidation about DOGE’s arrival among some in the building.

A new—and unofficial—sign that hung in one women’s bathroom read, “Meet the DOGE Team” and featured photos of 15 known members of the cost-cutting organization. Those pictures include Edward Coristine, Anthony Armstrong and, inside a yellow highlighted box, Amanda Scales, a former employee of Elon Musk’s AI company who was recently named chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management.

Any large cuts that take place, however, are likely to face opposition from both political parties.

“We have big [defense] spenders in both parties. I’m expecting all kinds of squealing as you’re trying to come back to some kind of prepandemic level spending,” said Sen. Ron Johnson (R., Wis.), who supports Musk’s efforts.

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“People are offering up things sacrificially, hoping that will prevent more cuts,” one defense official said.

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The Army list includes outdated drones and vehicles

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The Navy is proposing cuts to its frigates and littoral combat ships

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One place where there could be a target of cuts is at headquarters units, particularly at the Pentagon.

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TPenglake said:

. I'm thinking in the background there's got to be some scheming going on targeting at the very least Elon. Thing is though at this point, he's amassed so much power there's no way he will go quietly under any attempt to oust him. American politics about to reach levels of fireworks not even HBO writers can come up with.

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