Portside

A left stronghold? An alternative exploiter? The discussion continues

World military expenditure in 2020 is estimated to have been $1981 billion, the highest level since 1988 — and world military expenditure in 2020 was 2.6 per cent higher in real terms than in 2019 and 9.3 per cent higher than in 2011.

Reader Comments: Could Trump Win-Is He Planning a Coup?; Women Given Hysterectomies Without Consent by ICE; There Cannot be Peace without Freedom-Thoughts on the "Peace Deal"; Scourge of Racism; Use Art to Raise Antiracist Kids; Lots of Announcements

Reader Comments: Trump Calls Out White Supremacists; Trump and Military Veterans; Billionaires Plunder Working Folks; Allende Remembered - the Other 9/11; Why Congress Must Act - COVID Jobs Losses Continues; Lots of Announcements; and more...

For China, the global war for influence is about trading partners. For the U.S., it could mean something more volatile. China recently softened its language toward the U.S., stressing peaceful co-existence.

The U.S. must stop pursuing its counterproductive effort to undermine China, and instead work with all our neighbors on this small planet.

Why is Trump unraveling treaties on nuclear arms? It's not just greed -- some people want to use them. The test ban did - and does - slow the development of nuclear weapons and limits their proliferation to other countries.

Reader Comments: Unite to Defeat Trump; Lynchings, Racial Violence; Trump's Arms Race; Problem When So Many Police are Vets; Teachers Union: Cops Out of Schools; Labor and Police; McCarthyism and Black Freedom Movement; Southern Communists; Roy Cohn;

Reader Comments: I Can't Breathe - Again; Trump Second Term Means Tyranny; Reader's Respond on Tara Reade; Open Churches?; Vietnam; Indonesia; Chile; Nuclear Testing, Nuclear Cold War - Again; Resources; Events:COVID and mass incarceration; June 20th

Defense spending is higher now than it was during the Korean or Vietnam conflicts and may soon be twice the Cold War average. The end of the Cold War resulted in that rarest of all things: real cuts in the Pentagon budget.