Gold, Oil, and the Road to War

On Friday, Feb. 28, 2026, the government of Donald Trump, along with the Zionist entity, launched a full-scale military assault on Iran. Trump indicated that, as he did during the so-called 12-day war in June 2025, the attack aimed at killing top Iranian leaders.

This time, the targets included Iran’s “supreme leader” — as the expression is translated in the West — Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The 86-year-old was the religious leader of Shia Islam based in Iran, and other Muslims respected him as well. Millions of Iranians were outraged, as millions of Catholics and other Christians would be if a powerful nation bombed the Vatican to kill the pope. A U.S. airstrike on a girls’ elementary school killed, according to one estimate, almost 170 people, mostly schoolgirls. A brilliant example of U.S. military technology and power!?!

In addition to joining the assault, the Zionist entity has gone even further. It launched a massive attack on Lebanon, intending to drive out all Arab people from the southern part of the country. If that isn’t enough, it tightened its food blockade against Gaza, escalating the genocide, while the assault on Iran diverts the attention of the world. The war on Iran raises many questions, including the relationship between the Zionist entity, the so-called State of Israel, and the U.S.-NATO world empire.

The Reichsbank in 1939 and the Federal Reserve in 2026

In January 2026, the Trump administration launched additional attacks on the Federal Reserve System’s independence. This caused the gold market to go into a frenzy, with the dollar gold price spiking to over $5,500 an ounce. The price then plunged back below $5,000 after Trump announced the nomination of veteran central banker and Wall Street favorite Kevin Warsh to head the Fed after chair Jay Powell’s term ends in May. As of early February, the price has fluctuated around $5,000. While this may seem obscure to laypeople, it points to the economic roots of crises that have erupted on many fronts.

We’ll begin with Iran, then turn to the general strike in Minnesota on January 23.

From Caracas to Minneapolis

The Donald Trump administration celebrated the birthday of what those in the Christian faith call the Prince of Peace, Jesus Christ, on December 25 by bombing two African countries, Nigeria and Somalia. That Christmas day horror was only the beginning of its crimes as 2025 ended. As 2026 began, on January 3, the U.S. bombed Caracas, the first time in history a South American country was subjected to air bombardment, and kidnapped Venezuelan president, Nicholas Maduro, and his wife Cilia Adela Flores. In a world of nation-states, the government of one country has no right to seize the citizens (let alone the head of state) of any other nation-state.

On January 7 in Minneapolis, an ICE agent shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good, a native-born U.S. citizen who was a poet, a Christian, white, and a mother of three now-orphaned children. While the administration attempted to frame Ms. Good as a “domestic terrorist” who was attempting to run over the agent, Jonathan Ross, bystander videos show she was actually trying to avoid him while he circled her car with a cell phone in one hand and his service weapon in the other.

This horror followed weeks of a coordinated racist drive against the Somali community, which serves as a textbook example of economic scapegoating. Reactionary demagogues first claimed Somali immigrants had been capturing and eating domestic pets; more recently, they have weaponized allegations of “daycare fraud” to charge that Somali businesspeople are funneling federal dollars to international terrorist groups. By criminalizing the Somali community’s economic activity, the federal government has created the pretext for a permanent federal occupation of the city.

More than 2,000 ICE agents have flooded Minneapolis, and Trump wants to send more. This massive deployment represents a domestic application of the “Department of War” philosophy, turning a major U.S. city into a garrisoned territory.

The Historical Limits of Capital: From Stagflation to Artificial Intelligence

Recent media speculation has focused on whether 79-year-old President Donald Trump is experiencing cognitive decline, echoing similar coverage of his predecessor, Joseph Biden.

They’re the oldest men to have held the office. As people age, they become more vulnerable to the group of brain changes we call dementia. I’m not qualified to assess anyone’s health; what matters here is what these stories signal politically — confusion, factionalism, and instability at the top of the state.

At times, it seems that Trump has no coherent foreign policy. There are stories he’s pressuring Euromaidan Ukraine to settle the war with Russia on Russian terms. Then it seems that settlement talks go nowhere.

Gold, Overproduction, and the Emerging Monetary Crisis

On November 8, Senate Democrats made a deal with Republicans to end the government shutdown. The deal was attacked by many podcasters allied with the Democratic Party’s progressive wing.

Led by President Trump, Republicans threatened to cut or end funding for the SNAP (food stamps) program. In 2024, some 41 million people depended on the program.

In the face of court orders, they backed down, but the Supreme Court allowed them to go ahead with the cutoff. Hours before eight Democrats caved to Republican demands and announced they’d vote to end the government shutdown on Republican-Trump terms.

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.

Marxism versus Individual Terror

On September 10, far-right youth group Turning Point USA leader Charlie Kirk was assassinated by a sniper at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah. The FBI arrested 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, who turned himself in at the urging of his family. Turning Point USA specializes in organizing far-right youth to support the Republican Party and Donald Trump. Kirk was a thorough-going bigot who specialized in baiting African Americans, Muslims, women’s rights activists, gays, trans people, leftists, progressives and liberals. He also made anti-Semitic remarks that in no way excluded his strong support for Zionism.

Class War at Home, Imperialist War Abroad

Last month, June 2025, saw the twelve-day U.S.-Israeli war against Iran. On July 4, U.S. Independence Day, Donald Trump signed his “Big Beautiful Bill.” The bill means class war at home, and the twelve-day war against Iran points to more imperialist war abroad. This month, we examine the class war at home and the capitalist war economy.

Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill is a massive attack on the working class, science, art, education, and human culture in general. We could write volumes about this wretched thing, but we will zero in on the attack on the working class. The spearhead is the attack on the Medicaid program. To grasp its importance, it helps to understand Marx’s theory of wage labor and surplus value.

MAGA

On June 13, 2025, Israel attacked Iran. It is clear that the Trump regime knew it was coming and approved of it. Then, on June 22, the U.S. directly attacked the peaceful Iranian nuclear energy program with bunker-busting bombs. On June 25, the U.S. and the Zionist entity announced they were halting the bombing attacks for the time being, and Iran then halted its counterattacks against the Zionist entity, ending what is being called “the twelve-day war” for now. Next month, we will examine the consequences of the twelve-day war.

Last month, I noted that the tariff war shows we are entering a period similar to that between August 1914 and August 1945. The U.S.-Israeli twelve-day war against Iran confirms it. Significantly, Israel has threatened to launch such a war many times over the last 30 years, claiming it was concerned Iran was developing nuclear bombs. This is even though there is no indication Iran was interested in developing a nuclear bomb — Iran’s clergy-run regime has declared many times that nuclear weapons are sinful and forbidden by the Muslim religion and God.

Unraveling of the Post-1945 Order

As May winds down, the Gaza genocide continues, as do negotiations to end the Russo-Ukraine war, with no clear end in sight as of this writing. The Republican House of Representatives passed a bill now being considered by the Senate aimed at big cuts in government-supported Medicaid and possible cuts in Medicare and Social Security. The bill also features making earlier Trump-Republican tax cuts permanent, as well as adding more.

Liberals and progressives claim Republicans want to cut Medicaid to finance the tax cuts (capitalists don’t like to pay taxes) — but this is not their main motive.

Cutting Medicaid forces more of the poor onto the labor market by making them financially desperate to find a job or go without medical insurance. Nothing is being done to make more jobs available, nor are there plans to force bosses to provide medical insurance or wages sufficient to afford private insurance. They are intended to force people to work for wages that do not even pay the value of their labor power.