The twelve richest people in the US now have a combined worth of over $2 trillion (inequality.org, 3 December); that’s a 2 followed by twelve zeroes. The newest member of this exclusive club is Jensen Huang, boss of the software company Nvidia, whose wealth is now $122bn, over twenty times what it was four years ago.

This is at a time when there are over 36 million people in the US living in poverty by the official definition, including nearly ten million children. Over 650,000 are homeless, a figure that has increased for each of the last six years.

That’s capitalism for you: unbelievable wealth for a very few, varying degrees of poverty for many.

Astonishing news for Syrians that the 50-year tyranny of the Assad butchers seems to have collapsed amid a lightning offensive by coalition rebel forces. They have seized the opportunity to exploit Assad’s weakness in the absence of support from his military backers Hezbollah, crippled by Israeli strikes, and Russia, distracted in Ukraine.

The rebels have entered Damascus saying ‘After 50 years of oppression under Baath rule, and 13 years of crimes and tyranny… we announce today the end of this dark period and the start of a new era for Syria.’ At very best, Syrians can hope for the pseudo-democracy of capitalist wage-slavery. At worst, factional civil war as in Libya. They’re celebrating now, but the hangover is to come.

A 40th anniversary version of the Band Aid song ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ has been released to celebrate, as promoter Bob Geldof says, ‘keeping millions of people alive’.

This says everything. In a world with the capacity to feed the global population several times over and give everyone a decent comfortable life, capitalism’s system of producing food (and everything else) for profit means that we’re stuck where we were 40 years ago – ‘keeping people alive’ (with of course many not being kept alive).

Only a society of free access to all goods and services can solve hunger permanently, and end the need for charity of all kinds. Otherwise we’ll be stuck here forever

The 2024 report from the URI Global Rights Project reveals that ‘most countries around the world have failed to adequately protect the human rights of their citizens’. Countries with fail grades were more than double those with passes. 62% earned an F grade, while just 18% earned an A or B.

Hardly surprising for a global system built on wage-slavery. In any case ‘human rights’ don’t really make sense. There is the ‘right’ to bear arms, and the ‘right’ to kill apostates. But where is the ‘right to eat’ or the ‘right to a home’ or even the ‘right to peace’?

Never mind demanding concessionary ‘rights’ from the boss class. We need to seize our freedom through global revolution.