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This report was delivered on November 1 to the final meeting of the Socialist Equality Partys 2020 election campaign, titled On the eve of the Civil War Election.

The United States elections are being held under conditions of unprecedented social, economic and political crisis. Whatever happens in the coming days and weeks, there is no going back to the status quo. The alternative confronting workers in the United States and indeed internationally is socialist revolution or capitalist barbarism.

As the election comes to an end, the coronavirus pandemic is spiraling out of control. The Socialist Equality Party has defined the global coronavirus pandemic as a trigger event, that is, an event that is accelerating and bringing to a head all the underlying contradictions of American and world capitalism.

The virus is natural in origin, but its effects are bound up with the society in which it has emerged. It is exposing the consequences of decades of social reaction and the endless diversion of resources into the financial markets and the instruments of militarism and war. It is revealing the nature of capitalist society, a society dominated by a financial oligarchy whose control is no longer compatible with democratic forms of rule. And it is propelling millions of workers and youth into social and political struggle.

The average number of daily new cases globally is approaching half a million. The average daily death toll, according to official figures, is above 6,000. Already, nearly 1.2 million people have died. After a drop in the summer months, new cases throughout Europe are at record levels. In France, new cases average over 40,000, nearly ten times higher than the previous peak in early April. In the UK, new cases are above 20,000. In Italy, new cases peaked on Friday at over 30,000, more than five times the level in late March, when the explosion of deaths forced the shutdown of the entire country.

No country, however, has proven more incapable of safeguarding public health than the United States, which has four percent of the worlds population but nearly a quarter of deaths from COVID-19. More than 236,000 people have died from the coronavirus, and 1,000 more are added to this horrific toll every day. The number of infections is approaching 10 million, increasing by more than 10 percent in the past two weeks alone. The virus is spreading without restraint throughout the country, and hospitals in Texas, Wisconsin and other states are reaching or have surpassed capacity.

The pandemic and the response of the ruling class to it have created a social crisis in the United States unlike anything seen since the Great Depression. According to official figures, 13 million people are unemployed in the United States, seven million more than before the pandemic hit. Two-and-a-half million people have been unemployed for more than 27 weeks, and this figure is increasing at a faster rate than at any point in recorded history. The number of people in poverty has increased by eight million since May, and 10 percent of the adult population reports that they cannot buy enough food. Amidst a deadly pandemic, nearly one fifth of households report that they are not getting medical care because of the cost, while nearly half report that they are struggling to cover basic expenses and bills.

Mass layoffs are accelerating, as the ruling class uses the conditions of the pandemic to implement far-reaching changes aimed at boosting profitability. The economic consequences of the pandemic are having a permanent and devastating impact on an entire generation of young workers, predominantly employed in the gig and service sectors.

This catastrophe is the product of definite policies pursued by the ruling class over the past 10 months. The financial oligarchy is implementing a policy of mass death and social devastation. After first downplaying the danger, it utilized the pandemic to organize the largest transfer of wealth to the rich in world history, far surpassing even what was done following the 2008 financial collapse.

The printing presses of the Federal Reserve have been turned over to Wall Street, to the tune of trillions of dollars. Bank profits have surged. Morgan Stanley announced last month that its profits have risen 25 percent compared to a year ago. Goldman Sachs is doing even better, with quarterly profits at $3.6 billion, nearly double from a year ago. The wealth of the corporate and financial oligarchy has soared to new heights. Since the end of February, Jeff Bezos has increased his net worth by close to $80 billion.

It is impossible to understand the political situation in the United States on the eve of the elections outside of this social reality.

The final weeks of the election campaign have made clear: Trump is running not for president, but for Fhrer. The White House is the center of a conspiracy to ignore the results of the election, stoke fascistic violence, and utilize the courts to overturn the popular vote.

It is less than one month since the initial exposure of a fascistic plot to kidnap and murder the governors of Michigan and Virginia, plots that were encouraged and incited by the highest levels of the state. The plots grew out of the anti-lockdown demonstrations in April and May, following the bailout of Wall Street, as the ruling class was implementing its back-to-work campaign. They were encouraged by Trumps calls to liberate Michigan, Minnesota, Virginia and other states from any restraints on the spread of the coronavirus. Far-right organizations are being mobilized in order to implement and enforce a homicidal policy of the ruling elites.

In the final days of the election, Trump is doing everything he can to delegitimize the results. If the results are not known by the evening of November 3, he said in Pennsylvania yesterday, youre going to have bedlam in our country. He denounced two recent Supreme Court decisions at least temporarily allowing the counting of mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day. Somebodys going to play games, and they just got an extension. Whats the extension all about? Wouldnt you like to hear, November 3, we win, we lose? There is, in fact, nothing in the Constitution that requires a result of the election on November 3. The winner of the election is determined after all the ballots are counted.

Pennsylvania, a battleground state, is a particular target. Are they going to mysteriously find more ballots after polls close, Trump asked yesterday. Strange things have been known to happen, especially in Philadelphia. National Guard troops have been deployed to Philadelphia, where they will remain until after the election, following the eruption of protests over the latest incidence of police murder.

Whatever happens over the coming weeks, Trump is building up a fascistic movement based on extreme nationalism, anti-socialism and authoritarianism.

Trumps fascistic politics are directly connected to the ruling class policy of herd immunity in relation to the pandemic. In his campaign rallies, accompanied by chants of Superman, Trump is doing everything he can to downplay the threat to the lives of millions of people and encourage the spread of the coronavirus. In recent days, he has claimed that doctors are deliberately inflating the number of deaths due to COVID-19 in order to make more money. Trumps son, Donald Jr., declared in a recent interview that deaths from the virus are almost nothing, echoing Trumps earlier comment that the coronavirus affects virtually nobody.

While Trump is attempting to steal the election, the Democrats are doing everything they can to cover up the threat to the most fundamental democratic rights.

At his own campaign events, Democratic candidate Joe Biden makes no mention of the election coup, the plot to kidnap and murder Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and other governors, the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, or anything else related to the threat to democratic rights in the election. Indeed, the Democratic Party played a central role in the ramming through of the nomination of Barrett by refusing to do anything to stop it.

The Democrats cowardice in response to Trumps conspiracies is entirely bound up with their own opposition to any policies to address the spreading pandemic or the devastating social crisis. Beyond talking about masks, the Democrats have nothing to propose, as they reject any measures that threaten the interests of the corporate and financial elite.

The Democratic Party is terrified of anything that will spark mass unrest, which would threaten to develop into a movement against not just Trump, but the entire capitalist system.

The Democratic Party and the various pseudo-left organizations that surround it insist that in these elections all the energy of workers and youth must be directed toward the election of Joe Biden. Only in this way, they claim, can there be a return to normalcy and an end to the disaster that has been produced by Trump.

Completely absent from these arguments is any actual analysis of what the Democratic Party is and the class interests it represents, or the social and political conditions that have produced Trump.

The Democratic Party is a party of Wall Street and the military. Indeed, as the election approaches, Bidens fundraising in the third quarter has benefited from an influx of money from the finance industry. For the past four years, the opposition of the Democratic Party to Trump has focused not on his fascistic politics, but on the demand of dominant sections of the military and intelligence agencies for a more militarist foreign policy against Russia and in the Middle East, which culminated in the impeachment fiasco.

Biden has the support of some of the leading war criminals of American imperialism, who have wreaked havoc on populations throughout the world: John Negroponte, the former US ambassador to Honduras during the US-backed war against the Sandinistas, former ambassador to Iraq and former director of national intelligence; Michael Hayden, the former director of the CIA implicated in constructing black site torture centers under Bush; Colin Powell, one of the leading architects of the 2003 invasion of Iraq; and countless others.

The policy of a Democratic administration will be one not of social reform, as the apologists for Biden claim, but brutal austerity. The eight years of the Obama administration, in which Biden was vice president, saw a massive transfer of wealth to the rich following the 2008 economic and financial crisis. Indeed, it was the legacy of Obama, along with the right-wing and militarist character of the Hillary Clinton campaign, that allowed Trump to posture demagogically as an opponent of the status quo.

And it is remarkable that as Trump engages in his fascistic plots, the layers around the Democratic Party have dedicated themselves to an extended effort aimed at attacking the democratic foundations of the United States and attacking the legacy of the American Revolution and the Civil War. The center of this campaign is the New York Times' 1619 Project, a work of historical falsification that presents all of American history as a conflict between races, aimed at promoting the Democratic Partys politics of racial division.

As for Bernie Sanders, what has become of his so-called political revolution? The central aim of Sanders campaigns, both in 2016 and 2020, has been to contain mass social anger and opposition to both parties, to contain it within the framework of the Democratic Party, and to ensure that it finds no genuine progressive expression. He is performing that role now as a leading campaigner for Joe Biden.

To rely on the Democratic Party to defend democratic rights would be suicidal.

Moreover, nowhere in the media and political establishment is there any serious analysis of social and political conditions that have produced an unprecedented crisis and breakdown of American democracy. Trump is presented as some sort of demon from hell. To paraphrase Trotsky in writing about Hitler, they claim that if it were not for Trump, American democracy would blossom like a garden. What a contemptible lie! Trump is an expression of a far deeper disease.

For decades, the ruling class has been engaged in the single-minded pursuit transferring wealth to the rich. Beginning in the late 1970s and 1980s, the ruling elites launched an offensive to destroy all the gains won by workers through bitter struggle. Endless resources have been channeled into the financial markets through deindustrialization and the ripping up of social infrastructure.

Social inequality has reached levels not seen since before the Great Depression. With the crucial assistance of the trade unions, working class opposition to this social counterrevolution was suppressed. As a result, the national income share for the bottom half of the population fell from 20 percent in 1980 to 12 percent in 2014, while the income share for the top 1 percent rose from 12 percent to 20 percent. Wealth and income are even more heavily concentrated in the top 0.1 and 0.01 percent of the population.

The American ruling class responded to the dissolution of the USSR with an orgy of militarism. The terrorist attacks of September 11 were seized on to invade Afghanistan and then Iraq. More than one million people were killed in the war on terror. Torture was instituted as official government policy. NSA spying on the population became a central element of conspiracy against democratic rights. The persecution of Julian Assange, supported by the entire political establishment and spearheaded by the Democratic Party, was used as a test case for the criminalization of opposition to war.

All of this, all the crimes of American capitalism, all the inequality, all the violence at home and aboardall of this is coming to a head. Historians will look back at the 2020 elections as both a continuation and a new stage in the protracted crisis of American democracy.

There are various scenarios for what will play out over the next several days, on Election Day and after. What can be ruled out, however, is that somehow the political crisis in the United States is going to be resolved peacefully. Whether or not Trump is in the White House come January, the mobilization of fascistic organizations is now a fact of American political life. The pandemic will continue to rage, and there is no faction of the ruling class that proposes anything that will stop it.

What happens, however, cannot be separated from the development of the class struggle. The working class will not and cannot remain a bystander in events. It must prepare to respond through its own independent initiative.

Any attempt by Trump to steal the election in defiance of the popular vote will certainly be met with mass demonstrations. The working class must intervene through the method of class struggle. It must oppose Trumps coup-plotting and the incitement of fascistic violence through strike action, including preparation for a political general strike. Opposition to Trumps conspiracies must be connected to the independent intervention of the working class on the basis of a program that represents its own interests.

The working class requires a perspective not just for November 3, but for November 4 and beyond.

At the beginning of this year, we published a statement on the World Socialist Web Site, "The decade of socialist revolution begins. Before the pandemic had emerged as a global crisis, we called attention to the essential characteristics of the world situation that had developed over the previous decadethe institutionalization of unending military conflict and the growing danger of world war; the breakdown of democracy and the rise of the far-right internationally; the degradation of the environment and the growing danger of climate change; the extreme growth of social inequality, particularly following the 2008 economic crisis.

We wrote: The objective conditions for socialist revolution emerge out of the global crisis. The approach of social revolution has already been foreshadowed in the mass demonstrations and strikes that swept across the globe in 2019: in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Ecuador, Colombia, Chile, France, Spain, Algeria, Britain, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Kenya, South Africa, India and Hong Kong. The United States, where the entire political structure is directed toward the suppression of class struggle, witnessed the first national strike by auto workers in more than 40 years.

The dominant and most revolutionary feature of the development of the class struggle, we explained, was its global character. The working class is an international class that has grown enormously over the past two decades and is united like never before through the processes of production and advances in communications.

The growth of the working class and the emergence of class struggle on an international scale are the objective basis for revolution, we explained. However, the spontaneous struggles of workers and their instinctive striving for socialism are, by themselves, inadequate. The transformation of the class struggle into a conscious movement for socialism is a question of political leadership.

When we launched the Socialist Equality Party election campaign at the end of January, we explained that its central task was to fight for a socialist program and perspective for the working class, not only in the United States but throughout the world.

Then the global pandemic hit. As with everything else, the pandemic had a significant impact on our campaign. We decided very early on to cancel all of our in-person election meetings and our travel plans, in the US and internationally. We also decided that we could not petition to get on the ballot, as attempting to meet the already anti-democratic restrictions in the USrequiring the gathering of thousands and thousands of signatures just to get on the ballotwould have deadly consequences in the midst of a pandemic.

The courts and Democratic Party state governments defended these restrictions. Michigan Governor Whitmer, the target of the fascistic coup plot, even referenced the anti-lockdown rallies in the spring to argue that we should have gathered signatures, while the judge in the case complained of gyms being shut downthe same complaint voiced by the militiamen.

While the form of our campaign changed as a result of the pandemic, the essential content remained. Indeed, the pandemic and the response of the ruling class to it have demonstrated that the perspective advanced by the Socialist Equality Party, and only the Socialist Equality Party, is the way forward for the working class.

We say to workers and youth who are listening in on this meeting: The central conclusion that must be drawn from the experiences of this year is to join the SEP. You know what is happening in your plants and workplaces. The ruling class is using the pandemic to carry out a massive restructuring of class relations. The capitalist class has contempt for the lives of workers, forcing you to choose between starvation or sacrificing your lives for profit.

You see what Trump is doing. You see the conspiracies that are being carried out, which are directed above all at the opposition of workers. You know that there is growing anger over inequality, exploitation, unemployment, police violence, the attack on democratic rights, and endless war.

The struggles of workers cannot be advanced unless a socialist leadership is built. A political movement must be developed that takes direct aim at the source of the crisis: the capitalist system.

The fight against the pandemic must be waged on the basis of a program for the massive redistribution of wealth. The ill-gotten gains of the oligarchs must be seized in order to finance universal health care and other critically needed social infrastructure. Non-essential production must be shut down until the pandemic is under control, and all workers must receive full income and be protected from eviction. Where production is essential to the functioning of society, workplaces must be made safe, with conditions overseen by the workers themselves, in consultation with health care professionals.

To organize society on the basis of social need, not private profit, the giant banks and corporations must be turned into public utilities. World economy must be restructured on the basis of a scientific and rational plan. To carry out this program, the working class must take power into its own hands, to establish a government of, by and for the workers.

To organize the struggles of the working class, the Socialist Equality Party is spearheading the fight for the formation of rank-and-file factory and workplace committees, independent of the corporatist trade unions. It fights to unify the working class, in opposition to all efforts to divide workers along racial, gender and national lines.

There is no national solution to the global pandemic, as there is no national solution to any of the great problems confronting the working classinequality, exploitation, war, environmental degradation. The building of a mass socialist movement in the American working class must be connected to the mobilization of the billions of workers throughout the world, the massive social force that can chart a new way forward for mankind.

To meet these challenges posed before the working class, a new movement must be built, a political movement based not on pragmatic impressions and empty hopes, but on a scientific analysis of the nature of capitalist society. It must be a movement that is based on an assimilation of the great lessons of history--a movement that understands that to the crisis of capitalism the working class must respond with the perspective of socialist revolution.

The leadership of this movement is the Socialist Equality Party and the International Committee of the Fourth International.

I encourage all of you to vote for the Socialist Equality Party candidates, Norissa Santa Cruz and myself. But most importantly, make the decision to join the SEP and take up an active fight for the building of a socialist leadership.

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The socialist perspective in the 2020 US elections - World Socialist Web Site - WSWS

First of all, I just want to say that I am honored to be speaking today alongside so many leading comrades with decades of experience in our movement, many of whom were involved in the initial launch of the World Socialist Web Site and from whom Ive learned so much.

For myself and for a whole new generation of comrades, our entire political lives have been guided and shaped by the World Socialist Web Site .

My generation, the millennial generation, has come into political life under conditions of unprecedented economic, social and political crisis. We were graduating from high school just as the 2008 financial crash was taking place. And now, just over a decade later, we are living through a second worldwide catastrophe, the coronavirus pandemic.

The youngest generation, Gen Z, is entering political life under even sharper conditions. Consider for a moment that those just coming into political life in the past year have been confronted with miles-long food lines in the US, a president who is talking about refusing to leave office, and protesters denouncing police violence being beaten in the streets outside the White House, among many other critical experiences.

Even before the current crisis, young workers were living under the conditions created by 40 years of social counterrevolution, which produced staggering levels of inequality, mass unemployment and the lack of basic needs such as health care and retirement.

It was upon these conditions that the pandemic acted, exacerbating all the social ills created by the capitalist system. And now the brutality of the ruling class is on full display before the world, as governments everywhere embrace the policy of herd immunity, that is, sacrificing workers lives to protect private profit.

These are mass experiences on a scale never seen before. Nearly every person on the planet is aware of the coronavirus and has been impacted in some way.

Under these conditions, it is hardly surprising that a defining feature of this period is the immense radicalization of the working class, and, in particular, young people.

One statistic that begins to demonstrate this comes from this years annual survey conducted by youGov, which found an increase in support for socialism over the last year among youth who are part of Gen Z (ages 16-23) of nearly 10 percentage points. Over the course of a single year, support for socialism among these young people rose from 40 percent in 2019 to 49 percent in 2020. This statistic reflects massive shifts in consciousness.

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More on the History of the Fourth International

The International Committee of the Fourth International is the leadership of the world party of socialist revolution, founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938.

What the last yearand really the years before the pandemic as wellhas shown is that young people do not lack anger, they do not lack a willingness to fight, and they have a deep desire to change the world. We have seen this in the mass demonstrations against police violence and many other eruptions of social protest.

However, what is so critically needed is a political perspective and program rooted in historical knowledge and an understanding of the experiences of the past.

Young people looking for answers to all of the pressing questions of today are coming to find that there is no greater resource than the WSWS.

I know I speak for a whole layer of young people when I say that the WSWS is responsible for not only my political education, but, in many ways, my formal education. It is where I learned about art and culture, about science, history, economics and philosophy. It is where I first found a counter to the postmodernist and racialist poison promoted and pushed in the universities.

Like countless youth in the party, when I was first introduced to the website I spent months going through the archives, reading what the movement wrote about every major political event in my lifetime: the stolen election, the events of 9/11, the Iraq War and the protests against it, the emergence of WikiLeaks, the persecution of Julian Assange, the 2008 financial crash and countless other developments.

The real strength of the new site is how comprehensively it is able to bring forward this powerful archive. One can go back and read what the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) wrote the day after the September 11 attacks. The level of political clarity with which the movement responded is unparalleled.

One can find comments like Anti - Americanism : The anti - imperialism of fools , which takes a principled stand against all those demoralized middle-class elements who responded to the September 11 attacks with vulgar anti-Americanism in the place of principled anti-imperialism. The WSWS explained that it was the American ruling class, and not the American population, that was carrying out imperialist policies throughout the world.

Young people who have been profoundly impacted by the wave of school shootings can find in the archives of the WSWS comments like The Columbine High School massacre American Pastoral , American Berserk , which rooted the horrific events of April 1999 in an analysis of the nature of American society and the consequences of social inequality and endless war.

If there are young people watching who have not read these pieces and related pieces, I strongly encourage you to do so.

These are only two examples of issues I know have impacted young people so deeply in the past two decades. However, this exercise can be repeated for every significant political and social event and phenomenon in recent history.

Perhaps most importantly, in the archives of the WSWS young people will find the history of the working classthat is, their own history. It is a history that is kept from workers, distorted and obscured to serve the interest of the ruling elite.

They can learn about the Enlightenment, Marx, Engels, Trotsky, Lenin, and the advent and development of Marxism. They can learn about the Russian Revolution, the development of the Left Opposition, the immense class battles of the 1930s and 40s, including the extraordinary history of the American working class.

They can, and really must, learn about the history of the fight for socialism, which is contained within the history of our movement.

For the ruling class, the WSWS poses the most imminent threat. It is desperate to cut young people off from knowledge of the history of working-class struggle, of revolution, expressed most consciously in the history of the Marxist movement.

It is because of its powerful perspective that the World Socialist Web Site is unlike any other website in the world. It is an organ of education and struggle that will serve to arm workers and youth with the tools they need not just to understand the world, but to change it.

I encourage young people and workers who are listening to this call and who are not already a part of the ICFI to join today, to explore the new website, to help fund the new website, to understand it as your own, to contribute to it and promote it. Dedicate yourselves to a study of history and get involved in the fight for socialism today.

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The role of the World Socialist Web Site in educating a new generation of revolutionaries - WSWS

As others have noted in this meeting, the defense of historical truth is central to the work of the World Socialist Web Site. Our political practice is always based on an assimilation of the lessons of the past. The most powerful weapon the working class has is the knowledge of the historical experiences through which it has passed, in order to know what it has won, what it must defend today and how it must fight to achieve socialism in the future.

From the defense of the Russian Revolution and Leon Trotsky against the Stalinist and Post-Stalinist Schools of Historical Falsifications to the fight against the trivialization of Nazi crimes in Germany, the Trotskyist movement has been, from its founding, at the forefront of the fight for historical truth.

The great historian of the Left Opposition, Vadim Rogovin, explained that Like ideological ones, historical myths are a product of immediate class interestsRefuting these myths is only possible by rehabilitating historical truththe honest portrayal of actual facts and tendencies of the past.

Over the past year, the fight to defend historical truth took a new formthe defense of the revolutionary traditions of the great democratic revolutions in the United States, the American Revolution and the Civil War. It came as a surprise to many when the WSWS emerged at the forefront in opposing the New York Times 1619 Project, a rewriting, indeed falsification of American history, presenting the history of the US as a history of racial conflict.

In fact, we are the only publication that has raised any criticism of the project from the left. This confusion was based on the fact that the genuine principles of Marxism and socialism have been so distorted and misrepresented by the middle class pseudo-left, which is in fact an anti-left.

Our first in-depth exposure of the project was published on September 3, 2019, just two weeks after the project was published with much fanfare in a special edition of the New York Times Magazine. From the start we recognized that the most profound theoretical and political issues were at stake.

The rewriting of history is always related to the political interests of the present. As we noted in our original exposure, the aim of the New York Times is to create a historical narrative that legitimizes the effort of the Democratic Party to construct an electoral coalition based on the prioritizing of personal identitiesi.e., gender, sexual preference, ethnicity, and, above all, race. Above all it erases the struggles of the working class from American history.

We defend all that is progressive in history. We understand history not as a morality tale, but as the evolution of mankind through the development of the class struggle. We understand that the working class cannot conquer new heights if it does not defend what has been won in the past. And we are irreconcilably opposed to all efforts to divide workers along racial, national or gender lines.

Marxism long ago settled its account of the limitations of bourgeois democracy, but it never gave up the fight for equality. The progressive concept inscribed on the banners of the bourgeois revolutionaries of the 18th and 19th century, that All men are created equal, finds its most advanced expression today in the Marxist movement.

In Depth

The New York Times 1619 Project

The Times Project is a politically-motivated falsification of history. It presents the origins of the United States entirely through the prism of racial conflict.

The United States is the center of world imperialism. Its working class has been forged from innumerable nationalities and ethnicities from every corner of the globe. The challenge of uniting the working class in the United States is essential to the victory of socialism worldwide.

We are proud to have provided a mass audience for the best scholars of American history, including Gordon Wood, James McPherson, James Oakes, Victoria Bynum, Clayborne Carson, Richard Carwardine, Adolph Reed, Jr. and Dolores Janiewski, to voice their criticisms of the 1619 Project. They have all devoted their lifes work to the defense of historical truth and the principles of democratically motivated scholarship.

Due to the work done by the WSWS, the 1619 Project has been thoroughly exposed. The material that we have published, all of which can be easily accessed thanks to the relaunch of the site, has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times by readers worldwide. Above all, this powerful response makes clear that workers in this country and around the world are deeply attached to the revolutionary history of the United Statesembodied in the Declaration of Independence and the struggle to smash slavery led by Abraham Lincoln in the Civil Waras well as the monumental struggles out of which the working class emerged.

The relaunch of the WSWS is rooted in an understanding of the relationship of the past to the present. Indeed, in its very form it is aimed at drawing these connections. The WSWS is itself an immense repository of historical truth. What the WSWS has achieved over the last two decades must be brought forward and expanded to arm the international working class for the monumental struggles to come.

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The World Socialist Web Site's exposure of the 1619 Project and the defense of historical truth - WSWS

Pam Griffin|The Destin Log

People living between the Blackwater River in Northwest Florida to the Sabine River on the Texas-Louisiana border have to feel like they joined the Hurricane of the Month club. Living on the Florida coast, it's always a relief when a storm makes landfall away from us, but the multiple strikes west of us do bring a twinge of guilt. Jimmy Buffett wrote "Trying to Reason with Hurricane Season" almost 50 years ago, but that was about one storm, not a series.

By the time this goes to press, all the 2020 election votes will have been cast. Since hurricane season doesn't end until Nov. 30, maybe all the clamor about socialism will end. If a coastal community gets hit by a hurricane, socialism bails them out. Don't you believe me? When Hurricane Sally hit Pensacola, the winds had not died down before politicians had FEMA on speed-dial.

I grew up in rural Georgia, right on the Georgia-Florida line (not the Florida-Georgia line). Folks there would still be picking up debris from Hurricane Michael's 2018 devastation if it weren't for FEMA.Natural disasters overwhelm local and state governments, and a national response is the only suitable option. America tried the other way, and it didn't work.

A hundred years ago, a series of devastating floods wracked the Mississippi Delta. Arkansas suffered so severely the state declared bankruptcy. For decades the state didn't issue bonds and infrastructure withered. The flood's damage was catastrophic, and the region became ground zero for parts of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Critics called it socialism then, too.

South Walton real estate would suffer without the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), subsidized mightily by the federal government. According to a Congressional Budget Office study, the NFIP has a $1.4 billion annual deficit. Premiums collected by the NFIP leave a 25% shortfall annually. It's a government hand-out; deal with it. Even though I don't own an NFIP policy, we benefit since flood insurance props up property values. I'm not fool-hardy; we live on top of a hill.

I listen to Mike's Weather Page more than Jimmy Buffet or local prognosticators during hurricaneseason. Mike blogs about the weather, primarily hurricanes, but all of his data comes from the National Weather Service, along with information gleaned from other countries'weather forecasts. Civilized societies benefit from publicly-funded weather sources.

Americans have ingrained mythology about rugged individualism. We reflexively distrust government;after all, we overthrew one to get things going. But the first decade after the British sailed away was chaotic, and we formed a more perfect union; it's in the Preamble to the Constitution. Private industry can create the proverbial better mousetrap and improve society. Government programs have a place,too. The key is to find the mesh between them. Too often, especially in the heat of elections, we heara lot of misplaced rhetoric. Lots of people complain about socialism but cash the checks.

You can't always get what you want, but Buz Livingston, CFP, can help you figure out what you need. For specific advice, visit livingstonfinancial.net or drop by, masked, 2050 West County Highway 30A, M1 Suite 230.

Excerpt from:
JUST PLAIN TALK: Socialism doesn't have to be a dirty word - Destin Log

A supermajority two-thirds of respondents, including a solid majority of Republicans supports a 2 percent tax on households whose total net worth, including stocks and real estate, exceeds $50 million. Support for such a proposal, which was a plank in Senator Elizabeth Warrens bid for the Democratic nomination, has increased from where it was a year ago.

Oct. 14, 2020, 11:31 p.m. ET

Taxes on the rich is an objectively popular policy, said Sean McElwee, executive director of Data for Progress, a progressive think tank that has polled extensively on support for liberal policy plans. Over the long term, the wind is in the sails of progressives, in terms of demand from the public.

Mr. Trump and his party have tried to sow concern about socialism for several years. In the fall of 2018, as midterm elections approached, Mr. Trumps White House Council of Economic Advisers produced a 72-page report warning of the dangers of socialist policies to the American economy. The White House promoted it in a news release with the headline, Congressional Democrats Want to Take Money From Hardworking Americans to Fund Failed Socialist Policies.

In the abstract, the messaging would appear to fit with Americans views about economic policy. Polls show a significant majority of Americans approve of capitalism and disapprove of socialism. But there are movements toward socialism in subgroups of the country. Majorities of young voters, and Democrats overall, have a favorable view of the concept.

Some of the split comes from disagreements over how to define the term. Americans who favor socialism tend to associate it with Scandinavian countries like Finland or Denmark, whose economic and social welfare systems are more commonly referred to as the Nordic model, the Pew Research Center has found. Its opponents tend to associate it with Venezuela.

That range of definitions has allowed Republicans to lump a growing number of policies favored by liberal groups under the socialism banner. In a recent attack, Mr. Trumps first example of Ms. Harriss so-called communist views was her position on immigration policy, accusing her of wanting to open up the borders of the United States.

In my district, I hear a lot of fear about the dramatic turn the Democratic Party has taken toward socialism, Representative Kevin Brady of Texas, the top Republican on the Ways and Means Committee, said in an interview. My constituents are fearful when they see proposals to defund the police, abolish our immigration and customs enforcement, when there is burning and looting in cities, concerns over the Green New Deal.

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Why Trumps Efforts to Paint Biden as a Socialist Are Not Working - The New York Times