Palestine

On October 9, a new ceasefire in Gaza was announced. The last one took effect in January 2025 as Donald Trump assumed office. Many hoped this was the end of the Gaza genocide.

In March, the genocide resumed as Trump and Zionist entity leaders made clear their aims included the complete removal of the Palestinian population from Gaza. Kept open was whether this process was through ethnic cleansing or physical annihilation (literal genocide).

Physical annihilation was achieved by killing through mass bombing, cutting off food and water, causing manufactured famine, and disease.

The Reagan Reaction and the Coming of the ‘Great Moderation’

After World War II, the Keynesian reformers took unjustified credit for the postwar economic upswing. During the reactionary 1980s, it was the turn of the extreme right-wing governments that had come to power in Britain in 1979 and the United States in 1981 to take unjustified credit for the end of the protracted economic crisis of 1968-1982.

The ‘Volcker Shock’ and Start of the Neoliberal Era

As we saw in the previous chapter, the devaluation of the U.S. dollar in terms of gold had temporarily halted by the end of 1974. After peaking at $195.25 an ounce on December 30, 1974, the dollar price of gold fell to $104.00 on August 31, 1976.

As a result, during 1975, the rate of U.S. inflation, as measured by the government producer price index, was “only” about 4.4 percent. Still, the index rose more in the recession-depression year of 1975 than in the inflationary boom year of 1965. This was despite a slump that was considerably worse than that of 1957-58.

The Industrial Cycle and the Collapse of the Gold Pool in March 1968

Industrial cycles normally last about ten years — give or take a year or two. The second industrial cycle after World War II began with the 1957-58 global recession. Given that the industrial cycle lasts about ten years, we normally expect the next global downturn to occur around 1967. Indeed, 1966-67 saw a credit crunch and a “mini-recession” in the United States, as well as a recession in West Germany from 1966 to 1967.