The United States has been the world’s leading producer of major weapons systems and the leader in global arms sales for the past several decades.

Many of these sales have taken place in the globe’s most volatile region, the Middle East, than in any other region of the world.  The so-called peace deals between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, which were brokered by the United States, were business deals designed to expand U.S. arms sales in the Persian Gulf.  The Trump administration has made arms sales to Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and other Middle East countries the focus of its foreign policy in the region. No sooner had the ink dried on these agreements than disputes emerged over whether Israel had agreed to permit the sale of U.S. F-35 fighter aircraft—the most expensive weapons system in the U.S. arsenal and the most sophisticated jet fighter in the world—to the United Arab Emirates.  Until now, no Arab country had been allowed access to this aircraft.

U.S. arms sales generally have contributed to tensions in some of the world’s most sensitive arenas.  Saudi Arabia’s misuse of U.S.-supplied fighter aircraft in Yemen, the world’s worst humanitarian nightmare, has contributed to the rising civilian death toll there.  For the past five years, the United States has earned billions of dollars in sales to the Saudis, whose coalition has considerable responsibility for many of the deaths of more than 127,000 Yemenis, including more than 15,000 civilians. In 2016, the Department of State’s legal office concluded, in fact, that U.S. officials could be charged with war crimes for approving bomb sales to the Saudis and their partners.  

The Trump administration is currently taking on a great risk in proposing seven large weapons packages to Taiwan. The weapons would represent one of the largest sales to Taiwan, and would include long-range missiles—Boeing’s AGM-84H—that would allow Taiwanese fighter aircraft—Lockheed Martin’s F-16—to hit distant targets in China.  Last year’s sale of 66 F-16s for $8 billion represented one of the largest arms packages to Taiwan in history.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/09/23/arming-the-planet-the-usa-as-the-worlds-leading-weapons-dealer/

The 11 richest people in the world control in their combined net worths $1.106 trillion.

The total wealth of these 11 multi-billionaires is greater than the combined GDPs of Austria and Belgium, for instance.

But what is a trillion dollars?

 A trillion dollars stacked up in one dollar bills would stretch nearly one quarter of the way to the moon. That stack of dollar bills would weigh about 10 tons. 

To put one trillion into perspective in time—going back a billion seconds in time would take us to 1989. A trillion seconds in the path would land you in 30,000 B.C..

You could spend more than $54 million every single day for 50 years and still leave several thousand dollars left.

With $1 trillion, you could spend $1 million a day for more than 3,000 years. 

 In terms of what you could buy—well $1 trillion could but you every single professional sports league in the U.S. You could buy the NFL and then go out and snap up the NBA, NHL, and NASCAR and still have ¾ of your money left.

You could  pay a year’s salary for 18 million teachers.

#1. Jeff Bezos: $205 billion

#2. Bill Gates – $126 billion

#3. Mark Zuckerberg – $112 billion

#4. Elon Musk – $110 billion

#5. Bernard Arnault – $86 billion

#6. Warren Buffett – $82 billion

#7. Mukesh Ambani – $80 billion

#8. Steve Ballmer – $81 billion

#9. Larry Page – $78 billion

#10. Sergey Brin – $76 billion

#11. Larry Ellison – $70 billion

= $1.1 TRILLION

 Federal Reserve figures show that household net worth went up 6.83 percent in the second quarter, reaching nearly $119 trillion.

The data also reflected a “rebound in stocks and housing,” but, as Bloomberg reported, ” 45% of the U.S. population doesn’t own equities and about one-third of households don’t own a home.”

According to (pdf) a survey released this month from NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, more than half of households in the nation’s four biggest cities—Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, and New York City—reported facing serious financial problems during the public health crisis.

Robert J. Blendon, executive director of the Harvard Opinion Research Program at the Harvard Chan School, warned that “it’s going to get worse because there is nothing for the people we surveyed who earn under $100,000 a year to fall back on.”

In August, consumer finance company Credit Karma conducted an analysis of nearly 20 million members in the U.S. and found that they have a total of $45 billion of medical debt in collections, which averages to about $2,200 of debt per member. Medical debt has been growing further during the pandemic, rising 7% from the end of last year and just over 3% from when the pandemic started.  Experts expect it to continue to rise in the coming months since there’s a 180-day lag before unpaid medical debts can show up on consumers’ credit reports

“This is a lot of money when you consider nearly half of Americans don’t have $400 saved in case of an emergency,” says Colleen McCreary, chief people officer at Credit Karma. “What’s worse, this number is expected to rise in the coming months as Americans begin sorting out their finances in the aftermath of the pandemic.”

The nation’s billionaires, meanwhile, have been enjoying fatter pockets over the past six months. An analysis released last week by Americans for Tax Fairness and the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) showed that 643 billionaires saw their wealth surge $845 billion, or 29%, since the Covid-19 crisis began six months age.

The redistribution of wealth to the richest 1% over the past 45 years is hard to comprehend. In a Time report on a study by the Rand Corporation, it is estimated that the $50 trillion shift from the bottom 90% to the top 1% would pay every working American an additional $1,144 a month, every single month, year after year. If wealth distribution since 1975 had continued in the same manner as between 1945 and 1975, today’s $35,000 salary would be over $60,000. It’s little wonder that so many Americans are lashing out at the broken system.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/09/21/rebounding-stocks-surging-wealth-haves-and-widespread-economic-misery-have-nots

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/09/21/how-hypocrites-high-places-have-contributed-riots-streets

 Trump is a far-right politician and chauvinistic nationalist. Biden too plays the patriot card also declaring America is the greatest nation in the world. What makes the US so exceptional is that its nationalism and patriotism is shared across the political spectrum. USA Number One is something Republicans and Democrats agree on. In the United States the national anthem is played at every sporting event whereas other countries will play it only on international occasions. 

Americans are proud of their democracy yet they are oblivious to the numerous flaws and faults that are obvious to many observers from other parts of the world. Gerrymandering and voter suppression affect almost every state. 

 Economically, America ranks eighth in GDP per capita. In terms of its Gini coefficient, the indicator of economic inequality, the US ranks 51st – sandwiched between Djibouti (50) and the Ivory Coast (52). Other indicators of development, like corruption (23), education (26) and healthcare (30), the US also scores far below a long list of other countries. 

No wonder Americans are only the 19th happiest people in the world.  

The aspirations of American progressives are for goals long ago achieved by most European countries: free healthcare for all, access to abortion provisions, strict gun laws, affordable education and so on.

Americans have to face reality. The World Socialist Party tells our fellow-workers they are not, and never have been, the greatest country in the world.

The two-party system is why the choice is demented Trump or dementia Biden. Both fight for Wall Street and maintaining America as the world’s dominant military power. The Democrats are the ‘left’ wing and the Republicans the ‘right’ of the Capitalist Party.  On all the issues vital to the plutocrats and oligarchs they are at one, offering their masters bipartisan support. It is a fake rivalry creating an illusion of choice in America. Biden and Trump are aligned on many crucial issues, from opposing universal Medicare4All, supporting fracking, financing the military and deploying it in foreign countries, to the support of Israeli apartheid and Saudi Arabian despotism.In the one-sided class war the capitalists have been waging against the working class for decades. The two-party racket rests on duplicity. During election time the candidates of the major parties masquerade as dedicated servants of the peoples’ welfare in order to solicit votes and win office. The Republocrat partnership to secure funds for campaigning and to stay in office must do the bidding of business interests on all major questions of foreign and domestic policy. 

Biden is seen by many as the knight in shining armor who will come to the peasants rescue and do battle with the evil baron. A romantic fiction. Biden is no champion of the people and he is not the sworn enemy of the bourgeoisie. He is no savior who will throw the money-changers out of the temple. The Democratic Party cannot become a vehicle to raise progressive politics, as was shown by the rejection of Sanders in 2016 and in 2020. 

The Justice Democrats, the DSA, and all the other progressives will never be a voice within the Democratic Party machine. They have fallen into the trap of voting for the lesser evil. Such electoral tactics are pretty much a ploy by the ruling class and eventually lead to the same, or very similar, outcomes. For sure, an independent party of labor, a real socialist party, will not be a majority for many years to come with the capitalist parties dominating but it gives a choice to those of us who will not accept the status quo. It offers a possibility of progress. Business interests, the plutocracy, rule the land and loot the people. The capitalists who rob within the law will feel secure for four more years if either Trump or Biden is sent to the White House. The greatest liar is he who sees only liars in others. The thought of four more years of Trump certainly is frightening. No one would dispute that. And it is the message of the sheep-dogs to shepherd us all into the the Democratic fold, as the “the lesser evil”. We should not be accomplices to any illusion of substantive change with Biden. People think they are electing Democrats to fight for them. It turns in reality, that the Democrats barely believe in fighting for what little they believe in, and that what they believe in isn’t much worth fighting for.

The World Socialist Party recognizes that lesser evil capitalist politics can never free workers from exploitation and domination.  Backing any candidate of the most powerful military industrial complex in the world is impossible for a genuine socialist. We appeal to our fellow-workers to quit capitalist parties of whatever name and join the World Socialist Party, the only party of the working class in the United States. This election is a splendid time for an educational campaign against the capitalist state; and not for a reformist party to take governmental office as a handmaiden of capitalism, but for a party to overthrow the capitalist system. It is a splendid time to campaign for a revolutionary socialist party. This is the splendid time when our fellow-workers can learn about the liberating ideas of socialism from its genuine proponents and work towards a fundamental socialist transformation of the United State

The World Socialist Party completely divorces itself from the Democratic and Republican electoral machines and declares a war to the death upon them. We pledge intransigent opposition to the capitalist parties. While Debs urged people to climb out of the two-party swamp, the Left today has become totally immersed in it with its path of lesser evilism. The price to be be paid by the pseudo-realists and opportunists of the “lesser evil” choice, practitioners of coalition politics with the capitalist candidates is that a viable independent socialist movement never materializes because the Left will never enjoy the harvest without first tilling the soil and sowing the seeds for a new departure in American politics.

The result of the November 3rd election will likely be further demoralizing for the social movements and for working people. But ultimately — we do not pretend to predict when — capitalism will try to cross a bridge too far in their lust for profit and power. When that happens, the fight–back may well break out for real and change politics forever.

The richest one-tenth of Americans owned more than two-thirds of the nation’s wealth, according to Fed data through the end of March, the latest period for which data are available. 

The top 1% owned 31%.

Workers everywhere have an underlying common interest around which to unite. Capitalism, in contrast, is fundamentally anarchic; the capitalists cannot overcome their divisions. The coronavirus pandemic and Black Lives Matters protests have showed the enormous hatred growing against the horrors of capitalism. That hatred has to be turned into dedication to overthrow the entire capitalist system.

Labor has no voice in nominating the candidates. Labor has no say in drafting the platforms. Labor will have no control over the victorious politician. The lords of commerce and barons of industry rule. 

The capitalists understand this clearly. American labor will be suckered again in the 2020 election. Big Business possesses two parties under its control, with one always in reserve when public dissatisfaction has temporarily exhausted the other.

Our task is to organize the labor vote for socialist candidates rather than for the candidates of Wall Street. The myth that Biden is a “liberal” continues on, despite all evidence to the contrary. It is carefully nurtured by the media monopoly. Whatever the rhetoric emanating from the progressive left, corporate America, the banks, Wall Street and the hedge funds can be sure that the Democratic Party remains in safe hands with Biden and Harris. Even Sanders concedes, “it’s Wall Street that regulates Congress.”

The progressives have one great choice before them from now on. Two roads remain before them. They can take the road of independent political action, or they can continue the present policy of tying themselves to capitalist politics, which in essence means support to the political representatives of the economic rulers whom it fights on the economic field. It would mean a sharp break with capitalist politics and its organizations. How many times must labor have to repeat its experience with the two old capitalist-dominated boss parties, before it learns that nothing can be gained through playing ball with them? Democrats have joined the Republicans in protecting the interests of employers. The side-lining of Sanders should have been instructive to those who still believe that the Democratic Party can be transformed into a “party of the people,” or that labor can defend and advance its political interests without building a new party of its own.

The working class should not support any of the presidential candidates, as none offer any program which would benefit the working people of the United States.

The policies advanced by Trump and Biden differ only in superficial respects. Both would continue the assault on the living standards of working people, boost corporate profits, continue to slash social services and take back reforms won through hard struggle over the past years, and step up U.S.  war preparations.

This year the Democrats and Republicans have never looked so similar, with both reflecting the conservative mood within the U.S. ruling class. When the voters enter the voting booth they will face no real choice other than the different candidates’ personalities. The working class should reject the big business candidates and their common programs of economic austerity, repression and war preparations. Working people must reject the “lesser evil” argument for Biden (or for Trump, for that matter) – there is no such thing when the choice is between chickenpox and measles. The “lesser evil” fallacy serves only to underestimate the danger of the poison you pick, and keeps the masses chained to the bourgeois political system and its two parties. By not voting for any candidate working people will register their rejection of the big business candidates. Voting in the presidential election would only strengthen the two-party system and hold back the process of forging a political trend independent of the elite. The presidential office is the highest in the land, and is therefore controlled most tightly by the Big Business

The word on every politician’s lips in this election season is “change” but nothing will change, despite millions of working class people desperate for relief from years of hardship, hope the elections will make a difference. 

Elections are always difficult for capitalist politicians. They must appeal to the workers for their votes while reassuring the ruling class that its interests will be protected. The more the candidates can find a theme that can unite the working class behind capitalist interests, the better. In these elections, the vague promise of “change” has fit the bill perfectly, since the ruling class itself is for the most part desperate for a change in government. Of course, the workers have a very different idea of what “change” means.

The answer to this world of exploitation, oppression and war is working-class revolution that will overthrow the capitalists and their profit-driven system and build a socialist world of freedom and abundance. We don’t have to take what the powers-that-be give to us. We can create a new politics. Readers interested in an alternative to the parties of capital in the Capitol may look at the WSPUS website.

 The UK’s poorest households struggle to afford to meet the government’s recommended guidelines on a healthy diet, leaving them more at risk of obesity and heart disease.

With healthy foods three times as expensive as less healthy ones, the 20% least well-off families must spend 40p of every pound of their income in order to achieve an officially nutritious diet, according to the Broken Plate audit, compared with just 8p in the pound for families in the wealthiest 20%.

The Food Foundation thinktank estimates that if the diets of the least well-off do not improve, more than half of the children born in the UK this year will experience obesity as a result of poor diet by the time they are 65.

Existing inequalities in the ability of families to buy sufficient healthy food had been highlighted during the coronavirus pandemic, which had demonstrated a “failing system where the poorest simply cannot afford to feed their families”, the foundation said.

Foundation director Anna Taylor said: “Covid has exposed the devastating consequences of diet-related disease, showing that efforts to shift our food system in favour of healthy eating have been too little, too late. Leaving citizens to swim against the tide of a system which favours unhealthy eating is no longer an option.”

The government recommends people eat at least five portions of fruit and vegetables a day, two portions of fish a week, while limiting consumption of meat and processed food high in sugar and salt.

The foundation said, however, that the mean price of fruit and vegetables continues to soar – it cost £9.39 per 1,000 calories in 2019, having risen every year since 2016 – while the price of food and drinks that are high in sugar, salt and/or fat has remained stable at £3.54 per 1,000 calories.

“We need to ensure that people aren’t incentivised to buy less healthy food because it is more affordable,” the report said.

 The Broken Plate report comes amid increasing concern over a growing crisis of food poverty and unhealthy eating, exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic, in which the poorest households struggle to eat regularly and healthily, and reliance on charity food parcels is growing. The Food Standards Agency reported in August that the pandemic had had a catastrophic effect on the nutritional health of the poorest families, with as many as one in 10 forced to use food banks, and millions skipping meals or going hungry.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/sep/21/uk-poorest-nutrition-guidelines-obesity

 The UK’s poorest households struggle to afford to meet the government’s recommended guidelines on a healthy diet, leaving them more at risk of obesity and heart disease.

With healthy foods three times as expensive as less healthy ones, the 20% least well-off families must spend 40p of every pound of their income in order to achieve an officially nutritious diet, according to the Broken Plate audit, compared with just 8p in the pound for families in the wealthiest 20%.

The Food Foundation thinktank estimates that if the diets of the least well-off do not improve, more than half of the children born in the UK this year will experience obesity as a result of poor diet by the time they are 65.

Existing inequalities in the ability of families to buy sufficient healthy food had been highlighted during the coronavirus pandemic, which had demonstrated a “failing system where the poorest simply cannot afford to feed their families”, the foundation said.

Foundation director Anna Taylor said: “Covid has exposed the devastating consequences of diet-related disease, showing that efforts to shift our food system in favour of healthy eating have been too little, too late. Leaving citizens to swim against the tide of a system which favours unhealthy eating is no longer an option.”

The government recommends people eat at least five portions of fruit and vegetables a day, two portions of fish a week, while limiting consumption of meat and processed food high in sugar and salt.

The foundation said, however, that the mean price of fruit and vegetables continues to soar – it cost £9.39 per 1,000 calories in 2019, having risen every year since 2016 – while the price of food and drinks that are high in sugar, salt and/or fat has remained stable at £3.54 per 1,000 calories.

“We need to ensure that people aren’t incentivised to buy less healthy food because it is more affordable,” the report said.

 The Broken Plate report comes amid increasing concern over a growing crisis of food poverty and unhealthy eating, exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic, in which the poorest households struggle to eat regularly and healthily, and reliance on charity food parcels is growing. The Food Standards Agency reported in August that the pandemic had had a catastrophic effect on the nutritional health of the poorest families, with as many as one in 10 forced to use food banks, and millions skipping meals or going hungry.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/sep/21/uk-poorest-nutrition-guidelines-obesity

In 1620 the Mayflower took its 102 men, women, and children – the majority of whom were Puritan religious dissenters known as Separatists, but also called Pilgrims – from Plymouth to what they hoped would be the Hudson river.  It was an act of madness because they were going at the wrong time of year into an incredibly dangerous Atlantic.

They endured a treacherous 66-day voyage and were blown off course, landing on the tip of what is now Massachusetts, before crossing the bay to set up a colony on land belonging to the Wampanoag, whose name means “people of the first light” and who had inhabited the area for some 12,000 years. They had an estimated population of at least 15,000 in the early 1600s, and lived in villages on the Massachusetts coast and inland. Their help enabled the English to survive, and also became the basis for the much-mythologised first Thanksgiving feast, still celebrated in the US. Although there were periods of good relations between the English and Wampanoag, there were also violent conflicts, culminating in King Philip’s War of 1675, which ended with the head of Metacom, the Wampanoag leader, being put on a spike and the survivors sold into slavery. It was a far cry from the scenes of a harvest celebration.

Although the mythology presents them as fierce critics of the Church of England seeking religious freedom, they had already found that in the Dutch city of Leiden, where they lived for a decade before crossing the Atlantic. What drove them onwards was the lack of economic opportunity.

“It’s just not the story we think it is,” said the exhibition’s curator, Jo Loosemore.

 Economic factors fuelled the Separatists’ decision to obtain permission from the London Company of Virginia to establish a colony, and for funding from the Company of Merchant Adventurers.

But religious freedom and economic opportunity for the English would come at a heavy price for the Wampanoag. By the time the English arrived, the Wampanoag would have been familiar with Europeans, including the terrible diseases they brought. A few years before the Mayflower’s passengers landed, a plague wiped out an estimated 70% of their population. When the Pilgrims stepped ashore, the Wampanoag had been significantly weakened and were willing to make alliances with the English in order to keep their rivals, the Narragansett, at bay.

“These were people who came here for their religious freedom because they couldn’t worship as they pleased in their own country, and yet when they came to this country they did not seem to have that same tolerance for the people that they met here, despite all that the Wampanoag did to help them,” said Paula Peters, a member of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribal Nation . “You can’t have a colony without someone being colonised.”

Yet the myth of Native American and English in Thanksgiving harmony remains. This mythology persists, despite the fact that the Pilgrims were not the first Europeans to arrive in North America, and their relationship with the Wampanoag was far from peaceful.  US President Abraham Lincoln declared a Thanksgiving holiday in 1863 in an attempt at national unity while the civil war was under way. In the decades that followed, these strands merged together into a narrative, which was fostered by a New England elite that including many prominent US leaders who were Mayflower descendants, such as the second president, John Adams.

The Pilgrims are often used as an origin myth for the US, the English were late arrivals to North America. Juan Ponce de León explored Florida as early as 1513, and the Spanish had a settlement in St Augustine by 1565, while French Huguenots tried and failed to establish a colony on the coast of what is now South Carolina in 1562.

Some 35 years before the Mayflower, two ships set sail from Plymouth to explore the North Carolina coast, and the following year the colony of Roanoke was established, but by 1590 all the settlers had disappeared. Eventually, in 1607, the English had success with the colony of Jamestown, Virginia, which managed to survive. As well as these early settlers, Europeans came to trade – and often to kidnap and enslave Native Americans – well before the arrival of the Pilgrims. Jamestown, with its slavery, and St Augustine, with its Spanish Catholics, were ignored, and the national story became that of the hard-working, freedom-seeking Protestant “Pilgrim fathers”, aided by kind Native Americans.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/20/pilgrim-fathers-harsh-truths-amid-the-mayflower-myths-of-nationhood