America's Responsibilities

Charts: The scariest chart by far is first time jobless claims. Through most of 2009 it plunged sharply, reflecting good employment trends. But at the start of 2010 it hit a floor and traded sideways in a well defined channel, which spoke to an anemic L-shaped recovery in hiring. Today jobless claims jumped sharply out of that channel, suggesting a double-dip recession. Today’s bloodbath on Wall Street is because of the jobless claims jumping.

Geopolitics: The Pak Taliban launched a big conventional style assault on the Pak Army and got chewed up with dozens of bad guys killed. The Afghan Taliban launched a similar assault on NATO’s Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. And the Afghan Taliban was slaughtered as well, with the good guys barely scratched. The Afghan Taliban says that it is starting its spring offensive against NATO. The bad guys have a tremendous capacity to absorb casualties and probably don’t consider these two big assaults failures.
In Kyrgyzstan, violence against the government is steadily increasing with sporadic blow-ups here and there. The beginning of an Islamic insurgency is evolving and the highly stretched CIA must find some way of dealing with this new threat.
In Thailand, a full-blown civil war is underway. The Redshirt rebels trying to topple the government are not Islamic radicals but Thailand does have an Islamic insurgency that is helped by the chaos engulfing the Southeast Asian country.
South Korea has formally charged North Korea with torpedoing one its cruisers last month and tensions are rife on the Korean peninsula.
All three of these problems are America’s responsibility. The structure we have foisted on the world of an ever expanding US deficit funded by austerity measures everywhere else will only work if America truly solves all geopolitical problems across the globe. This includes Al-Qaeda’s advance in West and North Africa, the Islamic insurgency in Russia’s Caucus Mountain region, Somalia, Yemen, and everywhere else.