Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast in which we

explore whether by the US government playing matchmaker for the domestic

weapons industry or through the illegal trade of the

Iron River, the facts of the US being the leading seller of weapons around the world

fueling violence and conflict, oppression, and rights abuses.

Sources on our front page today include American Prestige, Big Take,

Face Palm America, great name by the way, Democracy Now, the Inquiry,

Jacobin, and Johnny Harris.

Then in the additional sections half of the show, we'll dive deeper into the US as a global

arms dealer, guns flowing into Mexico, and our domestic gun policy. What's in with some great news and that is the United States has expanded its lead in terms of global arms.

So Derek...

Yes.

So the newest report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute

or Cyprii, which looks at arm sales around the world and covers, does them in five-year chunks.

So every new report is about the five-year period leading up to when that report comes out.

And their latest report was, they released it on Sunday,

found that the US has increased its share of global arms sales to more than 40%, I think somewhere around

42% in this new report.

The expansion, I mean they were already the global leader but they were in the sort of mid 30s I think so it's a significant increase it comes mostly at the expense of Russia

since the the war in Ukraine, you know, the Russian military is retooled to primarily focus on fighting the war and also I think you know there's squeamishness

about maybe purchasing Russian weapons these days.

So their share of global arms sales fell by over half in this report and they've now slipped behind France, which is another beneficiary,

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