 For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. U.S. elections will be held on November 3rd, and while much of the debate around the electoral process has been focused on the personalities of Republican Party candidate and incumbent President Donald Trump and his opponent from the Democratic Party, Joe Biden, very little attention has been paid to the pressing social and economic issues affecting millions of Americans. We are joined today by Ben Becker, the editor-in-chief of Breakthrough News in United States, to discuss some of these issues and what the candidates have to say about them. Thank you so much for joining us, Ben. Thanks for having me. So first, I just wanted to start off. We're now on, I think, month eight of the coronavirus pandemic. This pandemic has wreaked havoc on the United States society with unprecedented levels of unemployment, with rising poverty. People are really in a critical state in the U.S. right now. And so I was wondering if, in this context where we have these huge U.S. elections, one of the most expensive electoral campaigns in history, if you can kind of talk about the economic situation in the United States, what conditions are people facing right now in this moment? Yeah, absolutely. It's a tale of two Americas that we're seeing unfold before us. The stock market in a few months ago hit a new record high, and the billionaires have brought in an additional over $650 billion since the start of the pandemic. So while it's true that the people are suffering, not all people are suffering, and in fact it's been a big boom for those who own the majority of the corporate stocks in the country. And on the other side, it's the exact opposite. We're seeing people waiting in long lines for food. The poverty rate, as you said, has gone way up. The unemployment rate is officially gone down to 7.9 percent, but the unemployment rate is extremely deceptive. It doesn't count those who have stopped looking for work altogether. And if you have a very low paying, part-time job, even if you're looking for a full-time job, you're not considered unemployed. So the real number of unemployed, some estimate to be around $31 million, perhaps even up to $35 million, just in August and September alone, for instance, 1.1 million workers who dropped out of the workforce, which really means that they've given up. They have a life of such despair that they won't even be able to look for work and are just trying to survive through other means. They're not going to be counted as unemployed. By contrast, they said the economy added 600,000 jobs. So in other words, more workers dropped out of the workforce altogether than the number of jobs that were added. And notably, 80 percent of those who dropped out of the workforce altogether were women. And that's an aspect of this jobs crisis that is somewhat new. In the 2008 financial crisis, it was women who basically powered the recovery women workers. In this one, it's 80 to 5 percent are actually dropping out of the workforce altogether because they're dealing with the additional burdens, of course, of household labor and other things that are just making it impossible. And because women are concentrated in the economic sectors, whether it's the government or service work that have been deeply impacted by the crisis. And of course, if you don't have a job, you don't have money. And under capitalism, you need money for everything, especially in the United States. You need it for healthcare. You need to pay your bills. You need to pay off your debts. You need it for food. So really an economic crisis or a jobs crisis is a full scale social crisis for tens of millions of workers. Yeah, definitely. And I think it's interesting to see in the wealthiest country in the world, the country that's boasted having one of the best recoveries of coronavirus. Obviously, the numbers don't speak that way. And at the same time, in the debates, the candidates are talking a lot about their heart position on China. They're boasting a lot about how they're going to get the country back on its feet. But what are the actual proposals that both Donald Trump from the Republican Party and Joe Biden from the Democratic Party are proposing to kind of pull the United States out of this deep economic crisis, a crisis of neoliberalism, a crisis of capitalism that has really been brewing for the last couple of years? I mean, you're talking about two arch capitalist candidates. So for them, they wouldn't even accept that there is a capitalist crisis or that there's something to be saved from. For them, this is sort of the way the economy has always worked. It's perhaps accelerated its basic inequality and features during this period. So I mean, to be honest, there is a difference. We couldn't say that there's no difference. Donald Trump basically has a program of a death march, just march everybody back to work. And that's really the proposal of large sectors of the capitalist class too. Get everyone back to work. People who have underlying conditions, comorbidities, older people are more likely to perish, young people won't die. It's basically a price worth paying for them in order to get the economy going again. They're even entertaining ridiculous unscientific ideas like herd immunity privately. They won't quite say it publicly, but really the Trump team is very seriously toying with these types of ideas. And you see it in terms of how they relate to the question of masks and other things that they really think that we should just rush the country back to work and whoever dies dies. The Biden camp does have a different proposal. And for instance, it's to have lots of stimulus, government payments, especially to state and local governments, which would make a big difference in terms of alleviating some of the situation. But they haven't really taken on the core aspects of the policy, which would be necessary to really stop the suffering. And that would be, for instance, to cancel rents and other payments for basic utilities, cancel the debt payments to get full paycheck protection. The government has so much money when it comes to the military, when it comes to bailouts. I mean, they just opened up the spigots and let all the money flow to the biggest banks within two weeks of the pandemic. There's nothing like that for the working class. There's been one $1,200 check. There's been very little to small businesses. Half a million small businesses have gone under during the pandemic. A lot of them are barely hanging on. And if they don't do well during this sort of holiday season, they're going to lay off lots more workers. So the scale of the problem is not being met by either candidate. I think to meet the scale of the problem, you'd have to infringe on the rights of capital. You'd have to infringe on the rights of property. You'd have to tell the landlords, you cannot expel anyone from their houses. You cannot evict them. You'd have to tell employers that you can't lay people off. But if you don't, and you'd have to tell insurance companies, you have to cover people. I think it's probably astonishing if people are around the world. But in the United States, millions and millions of people have lost their healthcare coverage during the pandemic. And one million healthcare workers have been laid off during the pandemic. So this is the anarchy of our economic system, which is on full display. And while some stimulus checks, which is what Biden and the Democrats are proposing, would be very much welcome by millions of people, they would really just be a temporary solve and wouldn't solve the problem. Yeah. And something you mentioned just now is kind of the looming eviction. So a lot of people are saying, yeah, this is the most important elections of our lifetime. November is going to be decisive. And for a lot of people, these coming months are going to be really decisive. We're seeing in a lot of cities, the more eviction moratoriums that had been in place since the start of the pandemic are starting to be lifted. Much of the country is entering into winter, the colder months. And so this is a really could be a really dire situation. I was wondering if you could comment on what are the struggles against evictions looking like and have any of the candidates commented on this crisis? Well, interestingly, Donald Trump stole a march on the Democratic Party a little over a month ago when he called via the CDC from a public health standpoint to put a ban on evictions. And this actually did have some impact because it was from the federal government and an executive order using a federal agency saying not to evict people at least until January. And that was welcome because there for many months, people were thinking that all these as you said local and state level eviction moratoriums were going to expire. And under all these rules, it's very important that everyone understand your rent is still owed. It's not a jubilee or amnesty from your from your what you owe the landlord. It just accumulates. And so when these moratoriums were to expire, it means you'd owe somehow four or $5,000 for the previous four months or sometimes $10,000, depending on what your rent is. And if you're laid off or if you're underemployed, that's completely impossible. I mean, even before the pandemic, 140 million people in this country were in or near poverty. 50% of people didn't have $500 in there, you know, they couldn't they couldn't find $500 for an emergency. So imagine $5,000 or $10,000 being owed to the landlord. So many of these big landlords have just been waiting for these policies to expire so they can begin evicting people in a large, large number. Right now, there aren't unexpected 40 million people, 40 million families really, that means that are potentially at risk of eviction. And already Trump did this thing, I think for the campaign to basically say, look, I care about people who are who are low income. But then when you got into the details of it, immediately all the landlord lobbies started saying, well, what about this exception? And what about this? And you had to be able to prove that you were laid off during the pandemic, and that you were financially impacted in order to access the ban. So in all the details, you know, they say the devil is in the details. In all the details, these moratoria have not have not really been as substantial as people need. And already evictions are beginning in the last six weeks, there have been 10,000 evictions across just five states in the south. And with the winter coming, and with the campaign ending, you know, it could be that everyone's going to be focused on that. And then the landlords who ultimately just care about their bottom line start evicting people in huge numbers. It's going to be a big crisis. There's a lot of organizing that's happening around the country. People are going into eviction courts to protest. People are physically like linking arms and stopping the eviction. Sometimes people are moving people's furniture back into their homes if it's been taken out. A lot of grassroots organizing. And the big demand around the country is to cancel the rents and to cancel the mortgages that ultimately we don't want to be fighting, you know, house by house against eviction. We need a policy that says there will be no more evictions and that there for the course of the pandemic, rents will not accumulate. Yeah. And I think, I mean, next week, not sure when, but we'll probably have some sort of results by the end of the week about who's going to be present president. We're just wondering, I mean, either way, if Biden wins, if Trump wins, what is the way forward for working class organizations in the United States? What is the struggle going to look like for the next coming months as we kind of end or maybe a second wave or the continuation of the first wave that never ended the coronavirus pandemic? What are the kind of focuses of organizing right now in the U.S.? Yeah, the difficulty in the United States is that while left wing and sort of radical proposals, including some of the ones that I said just now, would actually be quite popular among a majority of the population. There's no political expression in the major political institution for that kind of program. So we have the Democratic Party, which is a center right neoliberal party. And then we have a far right, sometimes neoliberal, sometimes semi-populist, racist, xenophobic party with the Republicans. And so a lot of people, because they consider that the greater evil, are voting for Joe Biden, really not because they have any enthusiasm for Joe Biden. Just they have a special hatred for the Republican Party. And the way the political system has been chopped up, it's very hard for a third force to emerge. But I think that is what's desperately needed. And I think that if Biden, for instance, were to win, there would have to be a major social struggle from below to fight for, for instance, universal health care, for jobs, for a guaranteed income. All the basic things that the working class needs, it cannot assume that these things will be given by a Biden administration. Quite to the contrary. He's been in Washington, as Trump says, for 47 years. He was the vice president under Obama on the issues of imperialism when it comes to the way that both parties view China, whether they both view Latin America, the Middle East, they're equally complicit and partners in really a shared foreign policy. So I think the people around the world in social movements undoubtedly are thinking, whether it's Biden or Trump, we have to prepare for a struggle. And I think for the movements in the United States, frankly, we have to think about it the same way. I mean, the struggle will look different depending on who the president is and the demands might be different. But it's going to be a big social struggle that's necessary. This past summer, there's reasons for hope for that. This past summer, there were 25, 30 million people who were protesting during the course of the summer. They weren't protesting for Biden. They weren't protesting just against Trump. They were protesting because they want to change to the system, a change to racism, a change to economic inequality. And those people haven't gone anywhere. They're voting now for candidates who don't really express their true politics, but those true politics and those true feelings are going to remain even after the election. I do think the coming months are going to be extremely chaotic. Unless Biden wins in a landslide, we could have an almost unprecedented political crisis where we have courts up to the Supreme Court basically deciding what ballots are going to be counted. We could have mobilizations from the military, from the police, from far-right militias. It could be a very turbulent time that we're going in. I do think that activists are having to prepare for that as well, where we want to both defend democracy and defend people's right to vote without just becoming champions of this or that capitalist candidate. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And I think we'll be staying tuned to the U.S. elections following the coverage of Breakthrough News and hoping for the best outcome in a very challenging scenario. So thank you so much for joining us, Ben. Thanks for having me.