President Joe Biden while speaking yesterday at a ceremony to break ground on a semi-conductor plant that making sophisticated computer chips is a matter of US national security in the face of an ‘assertive’ China.
‘All of this is in our economic interest, and it’s in our national security interest as well,’ Biden said at the site where Intel plans to build a $20 billion factory.
Biden made the trip to highlight recent legislation passed at his behest setting aside $52 billion to boost US semiconductor production. He said the initiative was part of the broader rivalry between the United States and China.
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‘It’s no wonder… that the Chinese Communist Party actively lobbied US business against this law,’ Biden said, with heavy machinery looming in the background.
Biden said the US will need state-of-the-art engineering ‘for the weapon systems of the future that are only going to be more reliant on computer chips.’
‘Unfortunately, we produce zero, zero of these advanced chips in America,’ Biden said.
Biden’s visit here also had a political component as the US midterm elections of November approach.
Ohio is a Rust Belt state where blue collar factory workers historically tended to vote Democrat but turned to the Republican Party and Donald Trump as industries died out and workers felt left out by globalisation.
Ex-president Donald Trump had last Sunday branded President Joe Biden an ‘enemy of the state’ during a rally in Pennsylvania as he slammed last month’s FBI raid of his Florida home.
Making his first public appearance since the August 8 raid, Trump said the search was a ‘travesty of justice’ and warned it would produce ‘a backlash the likes of which nobody has ever seen.’
‘There can be no more vivid example of the very real threats from American freedom than just a few weeks ago, you saw, when we witnessed one of the most shocking abuses of power by any administration in American history,’ Trump said.
His suggestion that the Biden administration had overseen the raid goes against long-standing protocols which see the Justice Department and the FBI act independently of the White House.
