Biden is really the tool of Wall St. And it is why did so many of the bankers and industrialists and the big business media endorsed him. They regarded Biden as a more tractable tool, not a different but a better instrument for their designs than Trump. Biden has proved supreme in the art of deception. His liberal camouflage often appeared so realistic that it has even frightened some capitalists further on the right. Biden’s ability to make people think they are getting something has been his greatest contribution to the preservation of capitalism. For his primary objective is to save the capitalist system. He attempts to do this by reconciling the workers to the interests of the bosses. Biden may loathe inequality but he loves capitalism more.

 Biden may well sit at the desk in the Oval Office but behind him stands the CEOs of Wall St. They will carry out their strategic aim – saving capitalism.

What makes a businessman tick? The lust for profit that means a callous disregard for the education structures and the health system. This present system twists and distorts the capitalists until they become monsters.

 Wealth flows into the hands of an ever narrowing circle of corporations completely dominated by a handful of capitalists who perform, no function in production whatsoever. At the same time the industrial machine becomes so complex, involves such an intricate organization, requires such a vast number of workers for its operation, is so highly productive, that it is completely ripe for the next stage of society’s development, the socialist system of production for use instead of profit. 

The purpose of the World Socialist Party is to assist our fellow-workers in taking control over our lives away from Big Business and vest it in ourselves. Future generations will wonder why we took so long to act. Not a day passes but what the WSP charges against the profit system is supported by new examples of the inefficient operations of this Big Business-controlled society. Quite naturally, Big Business believes capitalism is the best of all possible systems. It is – for Big Business. But it is hell for the people. Or haven’t you had enough yet? If you have bad enough, and are looking for a program to fight capitalism intelligently, join the World Socialist Party of the United States.

 With the costs of an ageing population rising, China is to raise its retirement age. In 2018, nearly 250 million of China’s 1.4 billion people were aged 60 or over. That is 17.8% of the population and it may exceed 33% by 2053

China’s retirement age has remained unchanged for more than four decades at 60 for men and 55 for female white-collar workers, even as life-expectancy has risen. In places like Japan and Taiwan, most men and women can retire and start drawing a pension at 65. The global average was 62.7 years for men and 61.3 years for women, according to an analysis of 70 countries by insurer Allianz SE.

Top among the complaints were from those closest to retiring, expressing anger over the prospect of delayed access to their pensions. Younger people argued that an increase in older workers would reduce their employment opportunities.

 With the costs of an ageing population rising, China is to raise its retirement age. In 2018, nearly 250 million of China’s 1.4 billion people were aged 60 or over. That is 17.8% of the population and it may exceed 33% by 2053

China’s retirement age has remained unchanged for more than four decades at 60 for men and 55 for female white-collar workers, even as life-expectancy has risen. In places like Japan and Taiwan, most men and women can retire and start drawing a pension at 65. The global average was 62.7 years for men and 61.3 years for women, according to an analysis of 70 countries by insurer Allianz SE.

Top among the complaints were from those closest to retiring, expressing anger over the prospect of delayed access to their pensions. Younger people argued that an increase in older workers would reduce their employment opportunities.

 The world is fast losing farms and farmers to the rich and powerful land speculators and agribusiness corporations.

In 2014, the Oakland Institute found that institutional investors, including hedge funds, private equity and pension funds, are eager to capitalise on global farmland as a new and highly desirable asset class. Financial returns are what matter to these entities, not food security. The September 2020 report on the grain.org website ‘Barbarians at the barn: private equity sinks its teeth into agriculture’ shows that there is no morality where capitalism’s profit compulsion is concerned. These funds tend to invest for a 10-15 year period, resulting in handsome returns for investors but can leave a trail of long-term environmental and social devastation and serve to undermine local and regional food insecurity.

Private equity funds – pools of money that use pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, endowment funds and investments from governments, banks, insurance companies and high net worth individuals – are being injected into the agriculture sector throughout the world. This money is used to lease or buy up farms on the cheap and aggregate them into large-scale, US-style grain and soybean concerns. The article outlines how offshore tax havens and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) has targeted Ukraine.

Consider Ukraine. That country contains one third of all arable land in Europe. The organisation Grain found that in 2014 small farmers operated 16% of agricultural land in that country, but provided 55% of agricultural output, including: 97% of potatoes, 97% of honey, 88% of vegetables, 83% of fruits and berries and 80% of milk. It is clear that Ukraine’s small farms were delivering impressive outputs. Reforms mandated by the EU-backed loan to Ukraine in 2014 included agricultural deregulation intended to benefit foreign agribusiness. Natural resource and land policy shifts were being designed to facilitate the foreign corporate takeover of enormous tracts of land.

Frederic Mousseau, policy director at the Oakland Institute, stated at the time that the World Bank and IMF were intent on opening up foreign markets to Western corporations and that the high stakes around the control of Ukraine’s vast agricultural sector, the world’s third largest exporter of corn and fifth largest exporter of wheat, constitute an overlooked critical factor. He added that in recent years, foreign corporations had acquired more than 1.6 million hectares of Ukrainian land. In June 2020, the IMF approved an 18-month $5 billion loan programme with Ukraine. According to the Brettons Wood Project website, the government committed to lifting the 19-year moratorium on the sale of state-owned agricultural lands after sustained pressure from international finance. The World Bank incorporated further measures relating to the sale of public agricultural land as conditions in a $350 million Development Policy Loan (COVID ‘relief package’) to Ukraine approved in late June. This included a required ‘prior action’ to “enable the sale of agricultural land and the use of land as collateral.”

 Frederic Mousseau recently stated:

“The goal is clearly to favor the interests of private investors and Western agribusinesses… It is wrong and immoral for Western financial institutions to force a country in a dire economic situation amidst an unprecedented pandemic to sell its land.”

The world’s biggest companies, Cargill, which is involved in almost every aspect of global agribusiness. Still run as a privately held company, the 155-year-old enterprise trades in purchasing and distributing various agricultural commodities, raises livestock and produces animal feed as well as food ingredients for application in processed foods and industrial use. Cargill also has a large financial services arm, which manages financial risks in the commodity markets for the company. This includes Black River Asset Management, a hedge fund with about $10 billion of assets and liabilities.

A recent article on the Unearthed website accused Cargill and its 14 billionaire owners of profiting from the use of child labour, rain forest destruction, the devastation of ancestral lands, the spread of pesticide use and pollution, contaminated food, antibiotic resistance and general health and environmental degradation.

The web that global capitalism weaves in a quest to seek out new profits, capture new markets and control common resources  is destroying farmer livelihoods, the environment and health under the bogus claim of ‘feeding the world’. Those farmers who survive the profiteering strategies of dispossession are to become incorporated into a system of contract farming dictated by global agri-food giants tied to an exploitative food regime based on market dependency and corporate control. A regime that places profit ahead of biodiverse food security, healthy diets and the environment.

From an article by Colin Todhunter on the Countercurrents website

Dispossession and Imperialism Repackaged as ‘Feeding the World’ | Countercurrents

Economists talk of a “K-shaped recovery” where the well-off bounce back on the upward tick of the K while the less fortunate slide further into poverty on the downward leg.

Stock markets are at record highs. And the very rich have done very, very well. America’s billionaires have added $1tn to their wealth over the pandemic.

Yet 20 million Americans are currently unemployed.  About 778,000 people filed for unemployment last week alone. For many hunger has become a major issue. Government figures show that the week before Thanksgiving – America’s biggest feast day – 5.6m households struggled to put enough food on the table. Huge lines have formed at food banks across the country and years of neglect and underfunding of the systems to help those in need have worsened their plight.

According to the Century Foundation, 12 million Americans will be cut off from their jobless benefits on 26 December. Anew round of stimulus have stalled and stalled again. The extra payments have stopped, the cash has been spent. Republicans, happy to run up record debts under Trump, are now talking about the need for “austerity”.

“It’s borderline criminal that nothing has been done,” said William Rodgers, former chief economist at the US Department of Labor, and an informal adviser to the Biden transition team. “They rammed through a supreme court nominee but have done nothing to help American families.”

A disproportionate number of those people will be women and Latino or Black and young, the groups hardest hit by the economic downturn. only one in four US workers have a job that allows them to work from home. 

Janet Yellen, the next treasury secretary of the United States, said that the African American unemployment rate in particular was too high but argued that the central bank was ill-suited to address the issue. 

 She told Reuters: “There really is a new kind of recognition that you’ve got a society where capitalism is beginning to run amok and needs to be readjusted in order to make sure that what we’re doing is sustainable and the benefits of growth are widely shared in ways they haven’t been.”

The US is on ‘inequality autopilot’ – how can Biden’s treasury pick help change course? | US income inequality | The Guardian

Billionaire owners  of superyachts often spend £200m or more on what is essentially a floating palace on the ocean. Three young British people died on superyachts, and their families never provided with compensation or even an apology from anyone. It’s complicated, not least because the yachts can operate in international jurisdictions, so coroners are prevented from calling people as witnesses, and it’s incredibly hard to hold anyone to account.

There’s been a big rise in the purchasing of Downton Abbey-style estates, costing upwards of £25m, where people who formerly lived in Mayfair or similarly expensive urban locations have relocated to get more space, more land, in order to escape the pandemic and house more family members. 

The very richest people have benefited financially – in fact, it’s been a very good year for the super-rich. That group – including people such as Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Elon Musk of Tesla – are able to take financial risks. Tech firms are doing brilliantly on the stock market. We’re all at home using Zoom, Google, Amazon and so on, so they are sitting pretty. The market value of Zoom is up over 500% this year!

A recent UBS report talked about how the super-rich’s fortunes have almost doubled in the last three years, and by more than a quarter during the recent market turmoil. Wealth is as concentrated now as it was in the US Gilded Age, when a few billionaire families – the Carnegies, the Rockefellers, etc – had monopolies on the biggest industries.

While whole families who would previously have been decidedly ‘middle-class’ are queuing up for food banks, the average pay of chief executives has surged far beyond that of the average worker. Just before lockdown, there were a number of chief executives who forewent their pay, but they’ll recoup it elsewhere, whereas their employees certainly won’t.

Reporting on wealth: ‘The virus isn’t a leveller. It has made the rich richer’ | Investment funds | The Guardian

Tens of thousands of Indian farmers continue to protest in and around New Delhi, the national capital against agricultural legislation they say could be exploited by the private sector to buy their crops at low prices. Police had used tear gas, water cannon and baton charges to block the demonstrations from arriving but eventually the farmers were allowed to enter the city.

 Farmers and their unions have rejected laws, which were passed in September which they say could cause the government to stop buying grain at guaranteed prices and result in their exploitation by corporations that would buy their crops cheaply.

“We are fighting for our rights. We won’t rest until we reach the capital and force the government to abolish these black laws,” said Majhinder Singh Dhaliwal, a farmer activist.

Farmers have long been seen as the heart and soul of India, where agriculture supports more than half of the country’s 1.3 billion people. But farmers have also seen their economic clout diminish over the last 30 years. Once accounting for a third of India’s gross domestic product, they now produce only 15 percent of the country’s $2.9 trillion economy. Farmers often complain of being ignored and hold frequent protests to demand better crop prices, more loan waivers and irrigation systems to guarantee water supplies during dry spells.

Darshan Pal of the All India Kisan Sangharsh Coordination Committee (AIKSCC) and Punjab president of Krantikari Kisan Union, said “They [government] have actually opened the markets, open the land and open the commodities of the farmers for the big corporate houses. They will form the mandis (agricultural markets), they will get the contract farming done and control the agribusiness. Our basic demand is to scrap all these anti-farm laws and assure the Minimum Support Price (MSP) [the price at which the government buys farm produce] as recommended for all the crops and assured marketing guarantee for all the crops.”

Sukhdev Singh, Punjab general secretary of the Bhartiya Kisan Union Ekta, accused the government of passing the laws “to benefit the big corporates…The government didn’t find it worthy or important taking us onboard before bringing these black laws.” 

Many people may agree that the agriculture sector needs reforms but they say the laws passed by the Indian government leaves farmers at the mercy of private investors. These laws loosen the rules around sale, pricing, storage – laws which had protected Indian farmers from the market for decades. This is what the farmers are worried about, even though the government says something of a minimum support price for produce will remain. Farmers say there will be no more guaranteed assurance of this.

Indian farmers continue anti-farm bills protests | India | Al Jazeera

Having turkey? Four companies process over half of U.S. turkeys.

Having ham? Just three companies control 63% of pork processing

Bread with that? Two companies process half of U.S. wheat.

Wine to go with the meal? The top four winemakers control one-third of the U.S. Market, with E & J Gallo controlling over one quarter of the market alone.

The farmer who raised the turkey or who grew the wheat received only 15 cents of each dollar spent at the store. 

Over the past two decades, farmers’ share of beef sales declined 8 percent, while the cost of ground beef surged 70 percent. 

Instead of reaching farmers, the profits are lining the pockets of the handful of corporations.

The farmers who grow our food are literally going into debt to do so. The 2020 net farm income estimate was negative $1,840 — and this was before the COVID pandemic significantly disrupted corporate supply chains, forcing many farmers to cull animals or plow crops under because of a lack of processing capacity.

10,000 farms are going out of business each year.

The food chain workers, from the farmworkers who pick produce to the workers in slaughterhouses across the country, risk their lives due to the COVID pandemic, forced to continue working despite enormous risk due to fear of losing their jobs, of company retaliation, or due to a lack of paid sick leave.

 The food system has been shaped by corporations’ power and influence and the elected officials who do their bidding.

Build a better future: We need to build a better food and farm system — one that works for all of us.

As We’re Giving Thanks, Let’s Resolve to Change Our Food System for the Better | Common Dreams Views

The seeds of socialism

 Deborah Berger, a product manager at Celotex, told the Grenfell public inquiry that almost three years before the 2017 disaster, colleagues alerted her that a safety test had been rigged with fire-retardant panels to boost the insulation’s fire performance, but the modifications were left out of marketing literature used by architects and specifiers.

She was so alarmed that she noted “WTF?” next to a photograph of the test rig where she saw that fire-resistant magnesium oxide panels had been fitted. 

She said: “I didn’t think Celotex would do that. I thought Celotex was a good company that prided itself on doing the right thing, on being honest. I was really shocked by this. It appeared to me Celotex had taken some materials and installed them to pass the test.”

Berger was the latest witness to give evidence from Celotex. She said what had been done with the test was “like a secret, something we didn’t talk about”, adding: “I wish we had…Things were shared with me about the testing of the product and then when I tried to be honest and open about it and talk to people about it, it didn’t go very far.”

Celotex executive wrote ‘WTF?’ on fire test report, Grenfell inquiry hears | Grenfell Tower inquiry | The Guardian

Elon Musk’s wealth grew over $100 billion since the start of the pandemic, from $24.6 billion on March 18 to $126 billion on November 24, an increase of 413%, boosted by his Tesla stock. His wealth now surpasses Bill Gates of MicrosoftJeff Bezos’s wealth grew almost $70 billion from $113 billion on March 18 to $182.4 billion.Dan Gilbert, chairman of Quicken Loans, saw his wealth rocket by over $37 billion, from $6.5 billion in March to $43.9 billion on November 24, 2020, an increase of 575 percent.