Blog of Richard Mellor, Afscme Local 444, retired, HEO/GED, 11-25-25
US President, Donald Trump, the man who has negotiated the end to at least eight wars, some say nine but the genocide in Gaza and Palestine in general is not a war, has agreed to sell America’s most lethal weapon, the F-35 jet fighter, along with 300 tanks to the family run business known as Saudi Arabia.
“We’re working on getting that approved very quickly. It’s already approved, don’t worry,” Trump said at the US-Saudi Investment Forum in Washington.
Supplying the Saudis with up to date weapons of mass destruction is the norm for US foreign policy as there is not much difference between the two capitalist parties on that issue. Generally though, the Israelis will get slightly more advanced versions being the main and up to now, the only reliable ally of US imperialism in the region, but the Gaza genocide has harmed that relationship considerably. The revolutionary potential of the Arab masses is also a factor as this is always a threat to the stability of the corrupt Arab regimes. The Arab Spring is not forgotten in Washington as the US lost a couple of reliable friends in that mass uprising, the dictator Ben Ali in Tunisia who fled to Saudi Arabia and died there in 2019, and the Clinton family friend, Hosni Mubarak who died in 2020.
As Mondoweiss points out, Netanyahu will most likely use the Saudi sale as a reason for extending the present $3.8 billion funding agreement it has with the US and to demand increased weapons sales to Israel. Israel’s horrific genocide in Gaza, violation of negotiated ceasefires, mass murder and assassinations even of people it is negotiating with, has drastically undermined its credibility in the world; the rampant state supported violence against Palestinians in the occupied territories is also a major factor. The US backing and arming of the genocide has weakened support for Israel in the US also, particularly among young Jews. Despite this, I cannot see US capitalism placing its settler colony in this important part of the world at risk in the event of changes in the Arab regimes.
The present agreement that was negotiated by Barak Obama, is set to expire in 2028. What is this but a gift to the investors in the death and destruction industry. According to the Costs of War Project at Brown University, the United States spent more than $31. billion in military aid and arms sales to Israel from October 2023 to October 2025.
US imperial power is without doubt the main destabilizing force on the planet leading to the destruction of communities, nations (Iraq) and resulting in millions of deaths. What is the terrorizing of Venezuela and Columbia and the murder of people the world’s foremost liar claims are members of a drug cartel (without providing evidence), costing the US taxpayer? Last I read was only 17% of Americans support what our government is doing in the Caribbean.
Consequences For the US Working class
I often argue that the first victims US imperialism are US workers and the middle class. Our living standards decline. We have no national public transport. No railways system like Europe or China. Our national health system is non-existent. Our higher education system even at public universities is becoming too costly for working class youth. Public services, that are among the worst of the advanced capitalist economies are being savaged further. States and local governments are in debt as some states buy Israel bonds to help support the settler colonie’s expansion and genocide. I believe there are even law suits by citizens in some states against this practice.
And let’s think locally. In my community just south of Oakland California, the city council will be coming to us for more money for vital infrastructure needs. The mayor said a few weeks ago in our local paper that we are living beyond our means; it’s the same story repeated throughout the country when it comes to city, state or the local budgets. There will either be property tax increases or bonds which are citizens borrowing our own money to fund what we need to live a somewhat secure existence.
There are close to 200 billionaires in California, 82 in the Bay Area, within a 60-mile radius from where I live. They didn’t earn that money. California is the 4th or 5th largest economy in the world. In the Central Valley, one billionaire real estate magnate, the largest orchard or fruit producer owner in the world (this is not farming) owns over 50% of a major California aquifer. A civilized society would not produce such disparities. This is a small example of where our collective wealth ends up. And people blame immigrants for our woes.
But it’s clear there’s plenty of money in US society as we can see from my few comments above, and we all live in a nation state we call the United States. It depends on who distributes the funds and where. The problem is that the politicians that govern our municipalities, usually members of one of the two capitalist parties, while promising to fight like hell for us when they want our votes, remind us we have to be realistic when it comes to finding revenue and cough up and/or tighten our belts (austerity). They are limited by their own consciousness, by their view of the world. No matter what they say, they end up as agents of the ruling class they claim to be fighting on our behalf.
The trade union leaders are victims of the same malady when they force concessions on their own members. While corruption (bribery lobbying etc.) exists in both examples, it is a symptom not the cause of their betrayals. It’s not simply greed in the abstract or character flaws. They worship the market as the answer to all things and see no alternative system of production to capitalism so when capitalism enters crisis, as it inevitably does as crisis is built in to it, they move immediately to bail it out—–at our expense. In modern parlance; they can’t think out of the box.
The great English historian, Christopher Hill, writing on the causes of the English revolution pointed out that despite the bravery of the revolutionists they were unable to overcome the monarchy’s blocking of reforms because they had a “stop in the mind” they believed in the dominant ideology of the time that the King was King by “divine right” he was God’s representative on earth. It’s hard to challenge that. But that ideology was shattered when along came Cromwell who suggested they cut off the King’s head and see what happens. The ideology was a sham and a new day was born.
I will end here due to length although I do have an alternative approach for anyone who wants to run for local office that can open a path to making serious changes in the short term and, if successful, permanent change overall. I ran for Oakland City Council myself in 1996 and learned a great deal from that experience.