Assassinated in Tehran

Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed by an Israeli-planted explosive device on July 31 in Tehran, Iran. Haniyeh was in Iran to attend the inauguration of the new president, Masoud Pezeshkia. Haniyeh had been heavily involved in diplomatic activity for some kind of ceasefire to partially pause the Israeli genocide in Gaza. I say partially because disease, hunger, and thirst will continue to take a toll even when the bombing stops. His murder occurred just weeks after Netanyahu, addressing Congress, received standing ovations as tens of thousands of demonstrators flooded the streets of Washington, D.C., demanding Netanyahu’s arrest.

Haniyeh’s murder shows that the Zionist entity wants to keep on bombing, a campaign that’s killed tens of thousands of Palestinians — many women and children — as long as they can get away with it. They aim to kill as many Gazans as possible while forcing the remainder to leave Palestine.

As they did last April, after the Israeli attacks on Iran’s embassy in Syria, Tehran promised retaliatory attacks. Unlike April’s response of largely demonstrative attacks, this time, they’ve hinted the attacks will cause real damage to Israel. So far (as of August 18, 2024), there have been no attacks while the diplomatic activity continues.

Genocide Joseph Biden Bows Out

On July 21, President Joseph Biden announced he was dropping his reelection campaign. He endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, as the next Democratic nominee for president of the United States. Top leaders are rallying behind Harris to stop any challenge from another Democrat.

The closest thing to this in modern history was President Lyndon Johnson’s announcement that he would not be a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination for the 1968 election. In June 1968, the leading candidate, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, was assassinated. This led to the nomination of Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, who lost to Richard Nixon.

Due to his advanced age, Biden was originally supposed to serve only one term, but somewhere along the way, he decided to run for a second. The Democratic Party seemed ready — with little opposition from its leaders — to nominate him at its national convention, scheduled for August 19 through 22 in Chicago.

How Vietnam defeated U.S. imperialism

In the northern hemisphere, May brings the return of warm weather as summer approaches. The school year winds down for students, graduation ceremonies are held, and degrees are awarded. But this year, all this happened in the shadow of the continued genocide in Gaza, with its tens of thousands of martyrs, the majority of them women and children.

In the final month of the 2024 school year, the student intifada against the collaboration of universities and the government with genocide swept U.S. campuses and spread around the imperialist world. In the meantime, Democrats and Republicans responded by launching attacks against academic freedom.

Billionaire capitalists who donate to university institutions forced their presidents, their loyal servants, to resign for not sufficiently repressing students. Under this pressure, some students who had completed their undergraduate studies were denied degrees, faced criminal charges, or punished in other ways.

Student Protests Against U.S.-Supported Israeli Genocide Spread Globally

Building since October 2023, the final weeks of April 2024 saw an explosion of student protests against U.S.-supported Israeli genocide in Gaza on campuses across the U.S. and the world. The latest, at Columbia University in New York City, was the site of a previous protest in 1968. That one was against Columbia’s ties to the U.S. military during the Vietnam War and was part of a wave of student protests around the country. It spread to France and helped trigger the great workers’ General Strike of May-June 1968.

The 2024 Columbia students demand:

Divest all finances, including the endowment, from corporations that profit from Israeli apartheid, genocide, and occupation in Palestine.
Complete transparency for all of Columbia’s financial investments.
Amnesty for all students and faculty disciplined or fired in the movement for Palestinian Liberation.

As of April 29, protests have swept across so many campuses that we don’t have the room to list them. We can safely say nothing of this scale has been seen since the May 1970 student strikes against Nixon’s extension of the Vietnam War to Cambodia.

The Genocide Resumes

It was announced on December 1 that Israel’s genocidal bombing and ground attacks on Gaza had resumed. Contrary to media reports, this isn’t an Israeli-Hamas war, but rather it’s a genocidal attempt by Israel, backed by the Genocide Joe’s government, to drive Palestinians out of Gaza into the Sinai, killing as many as possible along the way.

This would reduce the Arab population by about 2.3 million, transforming the current Arab majority in historic Palestine in favor of an Israeli majority. It would prepare the way for finally driving out the Palestinian Arabs from the West Bank into Jordan — again killing as many as possible along the way. The Israeli leadership — not just Netanyahu — hopes that Israel will be consolidated as a nation-state much like the U.S., Australia, and Canada became nations after the genocide and apartheid of the native population. This has been the aim of the Zionist movement and its imperialist sponsors from the beginning of the modern Zionist movement.

Origins of the conflict

Let’s briefly review the process of how Israel was, in the words of Biden, “created.” Toward the end of the 19th century, capitalism was being transformed into monopoly capitalism based on free competition (not the perfect competition of neoclassical capitalist economists).

Law and Bonapartism in U.S. Politics

I’m pausing my critical review of Anwar Shaikh this month. Instead, I’ll devote this post to examining the current economic and political situation as it appears from the belly of the beast.

The economic contradictions of the capitalist system are coming to a head. This happens just before a universal crisis of general commodity overproduction. It’s particularly marked this time due to the frenzied character of the COVID aftermath boom. We’re seeing the contradiction between the capitalist system’s drive to continuously expand production and the limits on production imposed by the market’s ability to absorb commodities at a profit.

The Federal Reserve System is trying to slow the U.S. economy to a sustainable pace without sending it into a politically damaging recession. It says it wants less hiring and a slower expansion of production to fight inflation. Inflation is seen to be the result of too little commodity production relative to demand. How does reducing the number of people employed and slowing the production rate reduce inflation? Shouldn’t the answer be to produce more and employ more?

Whip of Hunger, part 2

As May drew toward its end, the media was full of reports that the world economy was teetering on the edge of catastrophe. If the media is to be believed, the threat came not from the unsold commodities that accumulated due to the COVID aftermath boom. Rather, they said that unless the Democrats and Republicans reached a last-minute agreement to raise the debt limit, the government will be forced into default as the Treasury runs out of money.

In last month’s post, I declared that this crisis was fake. Sure enough, “at the last minute,” the crisis was averted. On Saturday, June 3, President Biden signed the compromise agreement allowing the government to keep borrowing into 2025. The compromise bill sailed through the House of Representatives with 314 voting yes and 117 voting no. In the Senate, the vote was 63-to-36. No small portion of that borrowed money will go to servicing federal government debt, the bulk of which is owned by wealthy capitalists.

Karl Marx on the national debt

Karl Marx wrote:

“The only part of the so-called national wealth that actually enters into the collective possessions of modern peoples is their national debt. Hence, as a necessary consequence, the modern doctrine that a nation becomes the richer the more deeply it is in debt. Public credit becomes the credo of capital. And with the rise of national debt-making, want of faith in the national debt takes the place of the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, which may not be forgiven.” (Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 31, Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist)

The Phony Crisis, the Real Crisis, and the Whip of Hunger

U.S. law prevents the federal government from allowing its debt to rise beyond a specific limit. As of May 2023, the limit is $31.4 trillion though this will be raised in the coming weeks. If either or both houses of Congress don’t, the federal government will be forced to reduce expenditures and forced into default. Finance capital won’t allow that.

On January 19, 2023, the day the legal limit was reached, the debt ceiling was not raised because of various technical loopholes in the law, but they are not unlimited. This is not the first time for this kind of artificial government debt crisis, which has become a regular feature of U.S. politics since the Obama administration. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen estimates that the legal wiggle room (technical loopholes) will be exhausted by June 1, 2023. So while an over-the-weekend theatrical default is possible, the chance of an extended default is less likely than the Vatican announcing its conversion to Judaism or Islam.

Is the federal debt crisis just for show? Not at all. A bill will be passed within the next few weeks, raising the current $31.4 trillion debt limit. To become law, the bill must be passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the President. The Democrats narrowly control the Senate, but the House of Representatives has a slim Republican majority. The House already passed a bill to raise the debt limit, but it contains provisions cutting the budget. Of course, cutting the war budget is off the table — instead, the GOP wants to gut social programs. The most important provision is to attach work requirements to Medicaid and food stamps benefits, as well as measures to promote the production of more fossil fuels. They also want Biden’s limited student debt forgiveness canceled.

Trump Charged

On April 4 in New York City, former President Donald Trump was arraigned in court on 34 felony charges brought by the State of New York — not the Federal Government. He became the first president to be charged with crimes — felonies — after leaving office. In the United States, arraignment is when the charges are read, detailing the laws allegedly violated. Then, the defendant enters a plea, guilty or not guilty (Trump pleaded not guilty). He was released without bail and promptly flew on his private jet to his luxurious home — one of many — at the Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, near Miami.

Even if Trump is found guilty by a jury — which wouldn’t be until 2024 at the earliest — he would not be barred under law from again running for or serving as president. Eugene Debs, the Socialist Party presidential candidate, ran from his prison cell in 1920. Trump is the opposite of Debs in terms of the class he represents, in morality, and in almost every other way. It’s hard to imagine the 2024 Republican nominee running from prison! Nobody expects Trump to serve a minute in prison even if convicted of every count and all appeals fail. The point of the charges isn’t to put him in prison but to keep him out of the White House.

Many liberal and progressive observers delighted to see Trump charged are dubious that these charges will stick. The charges of falsifying business records are misdemeanors under New York State law, not felonies. In the Clinton impeachment of 1998, the underlying crime involved an affair with someone, not his wife. Bill Clinton had an affair with young aide Monica Lewinsky. From a purely moral standpoint, Clinton’s affair with the young aide was worse than Trump’s affair with porn star Stormy Daniels who is well-versed in the ways of the world.

The New Banking Crisis

On Wednesday, March 8, California-based Silvergate Bank announced it was voluntarily winding up operations. The same day, Silicon Valley Bank, the favorite bank of the area’s companies and venture capitalists, announced it was selling off its portfolio of government bonds to raise cash. This triggered a run on the bank, forcing the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to shut it down on March 10. On Sunday, March 14, the FDIC announced it was shutting down New York-based Signature Bank. Both Silvergate and Signature were commercial banks heavily involved in lending to cryptocurrency companies. Problems leading to their collapse can be traced back to the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX cryptocurrency exchange last year.

Under U.S. law, bank deposits are insured up to $250,000. The idea is to insure small and medium-sized deposits. They wasted little time announcing that all deposits would be fully redeemed. The sound (or not-so-sound) commercial banks will be asked to cough up the money to make up for the massive losses FDIC will incur by paying off large capitalist deposit owners who weren’t supposed to be insured.

The FDIC hopes to stave off a general collapse of the currency system, which is based on using bank deposits as currency instead of traditional dollar bills and coins. If the bank deposits as currency were to collapse, it would lead to an economic crisis worse than the bank runs of 1931-33. Those marked the transformation of the recession that began in 1929 into the Great Depression. In bygone years, in capitalist countries, spending money mainly meant using coins and some paper banknotes redeemable in gold (or silver) at the government treasury or the central bank. At this earlier stage of capitalist development, extreme monetary crises in the form of bank runs did not threaten the purchasing power of the basic currency.