Gang Warfare

For weeks following Israel’s murder of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on July 31, the world wondered if (and when) Iran would retaliate. Haniyeh was heavily involved in diplomatic activity to end Israel’s genocidal bombing in Gaza. He had been in Tehran for the inauguration of Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezehkian.

Iran was widely expected to react by launching a drone and missile counterattack on Israel as in April, but this time to causing greater damage. Much to the surprise of most observers, Iran took no military action. It seems that the Iranian leaders were engaged in intense diplomatic activity to arrange a ceasefire to end, or at least suspend, Israel’s genocidal bombing campaign on Gaza.

Hezbollah, the Lebanese political-religious resistance organization, was also negotiating for a ceasefire. Its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, was one of the most popular and respected political leaders in Lebanon.

Elections, Genocide, and a Federal Reserve Cut

Recent polls confirm that the U.S. presidential race is extremely tight between Kamala Harris – supported by the Party of Order, including prominent Republicans such as Bush’s warmongering and powerful Vice President Richard Cheney – and Donald Trump. While many individual capitalists support Donald Trump, the really big money is behind Harris. This gives Harris a considerable advantage. When the big money deserted Genocide Joe Biden earlier this year, he was forced out of the race. The big money wasn’t concerned about his support of Israel’s Gaza genocide. The money bags didn’t believe Biden could win after his disastrous performance in the June 27 “debate” with Trump.

Polls taken on the eve of the September “debate” between Harris and Trump showed the election either even or leaning toward Trump, though Harris took the lead afterward. (1 )

Trump, however, can still win. What determines the presidential election in the U.S. is not the popular vote but the vote in the electoral college. The electoral college strongly favors Republicans. There is a good chance that Harris will win the popular vote – though this is far from certain – only to lose to Trump in the electoral college. This is exactly what happened in 2016 when Hillary Clinton defeated Trump by two million votes, but Trump carried the electoral college.

(1) I put the word “debate” in quotation marks because the “debates” between the Democratic and Republican candidates for president exclude all third-party candidates. Actually, these are not debates as traditionally defined about contending policies but instead are more like commercial, promotional advertisements aimed at deceiving the listeners. For example, in the September 10 debate, neither Trump nor Harris denounced the U.S.-supported genocide in Gaza. Instead of seriously discussing foreign, domestic, or economic policy in these debates, the rival candidates concentrate on putting their opponent in the worst light possible while trying to drum up enthusiasm for their personal qualities. The Democratic and Republican candidates use deception and, when necessary, outright lies to do this. A poster supporting Harris declares: “Vote Joy 2024.”

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.

The Genocide Continues

Israel’s relentless genocide against the people of Gaza continues without letup as I write these lines. In recent weeks, U.S. imperialism has tried to create the impression they’re putting some distance between themselves and the Israeli regime. For example, the Democratic Senate majority leader Charles Schumer said, “As a lifelong supporter of Israel, it has become clear to me: The Netanyahu coalition no longer fits the needs of Israel after October 7. The world has changed, radically, since then, and the Israeli people are being stifled right now by a governing vision that is stuck in the past”.

Schumer is right about one thing: The world changed after October 7 as massive protests broke out across the globe, including within the United States. It isn’t only Schumer. Genocide Joe’s administration, after vetoing every ceasefire proposed in the UN Security Council, introduced a resolution of its own, the nature of which was summarized by Russian representative Vassily Nebenzia.

“Nebenzia further described the vote as a ploy to throw [U.S. voters in support of a ceasefire] a bone’ with a false ceasefire call,” the web publication Truthout reported.

Palestine

To avoid any misunderstandings of what I am going to say here, I am a Jewish American who despises all forms of anti-Semitism. Like most Jews whose parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents came from Europe, I lost relatives in the Holocaust. I never knew them because they died in the gas chambers before I was born. I can also say that since childhood, I have never believed in the truth of the Jewish religion or any other religion.

As a child, I became fascinated with Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, a fascination that’s never ceased. Since childhood, I have been an unconscious dialectical materialist and then a conscious dialectical materialist from early adulthood onward. I have never understood those trends in Western Marxism that reject the dialectic of nature and “diamat” (dialectical materialism), as the more I study the natural sciences, such as biology, physics, chemistry, and meteorology, the more I find materialist dialects everywhere.

I want to make crystal clear to Mr. Biden and Mr. Netanyahu that if you insist on carrying out genocide in Gaza or anywhere else in Palestine, you won’t do it in my name! Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea!

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.

Where is the U.S. Economy Going?

In January, the U.S. Labor Department estimated that the non-farming sector of the economy created 517,000 new jobs on a seasonally adjusted basis. Reading the fine print, you see these new jobs exist only on the statistician’s worksheet. The estimate is that on a non-seasonally adjusted basis, the economy lost 2.5 million jobs. Just before the holidays, additional workers are hired to meet the extra demand and are laid off at the season’s end.

The variations are taken into account and smoothed over to reveal the underlying trend. This year, they figured about 3 million workers would be laid off. But these are estimates. Since only 2.5 million were let go on a seasonally adjusted basis, the economy created about half a million additional jobs. But how to make the seasonal adjustment is a complex subject. We are still in the aftermath of a collapse in the hotel and restaurant industries caused by COVID-19. Employment numbers tanked when people stopped traveling and eating out and have yet to return to pre-pandemic levels. Perhaps fewer workers than usual were hired this holiday season, so fewer workers were laid off when it ended.

Another factor was the unusually mild weather that occurred over the country in January. With little snow on the East Coast and Midwest, major storms were limited mainly to California. Wind-driven rain ravaged most of the state, except for higher elevations in the thinly populated Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountain ranges. The economy was disrupted less by winter storms than usual. Weather is not accounted for in making seasonal adjustments.

Money and Anwar Shaikh

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on June 24, 2022, to strip women of their right to abortion dominates the news. The Court overturned its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision establishing abortion as a constitutional right. The other event dominating U.S. politics was the congressional hearings into the events of January 6, 2021. These issues unfold against a background of high inflation, a looming recession, and disastrously low approval ratings for President Joseph Biden. On July 11, T he New York Times/Siena College poll gave Biden a 33% approval rating. The same poll showed only 26% of Democrat voters support his renomination for a second term.

Democrats, appearing likely to lose control of the House and maybe the Senate, hope to recoup power by making abortion a prime issue. A bill to make abortion rights a federal law has gone nowhere. Democratic Senators Joseph Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema refuse to suspend a Senate rule that effectively gives the Republican Party veto power over all legislation, the filibuster rule. Democrats hope the outrage felt by women and many men over the Supreme Court decision will cause them to vote Democratic in the November congressional elections. These elections will determine the make-up of Congress for the final two years of Biden’s term.

However, attempts by Democrats to profit from the outrage over the Court decision were undermined when it was revealed Biden made a deal with Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell to nominate anti-abortion Republican Chad Meredith to a lifetime federal judgeship. This deal — though it appears to have fallen through — is typical of Biden’s 50-year-long political career. As a young Senator, Biden played a crucial role in securing Senate approval of Republican President George H.W. Bush nominee Clarence Thomas to a lifetime position on the Supreme Court. Thomas joined the Court majority in throwing out the right of abortion as a constitutional right.

The Fed Meets and Congress Investigates January 6

In June 2022, the news in the United States was dominated by two stories. One was the decision of the Federal Reserve System to raise its target for the federal funds rate by 0.75%. The new rate range is between 1.50% and 1.75%. The second story broke the same week: The congressional hearings into the events of January 6, 2021. On that date, a right-wing mob, supported and inspired by President Donald Trump, broke into the U.S. Capitol. It was an attempt to force Congress to reverse the 2020 presidential election results. Is there a connection between these two? Yes, even if it isn’t a direct one.

Let’s begin with the Federal Reserve story. For most people, Federal Reserve operations are a mystery. The federal funds rate is the interest rate charged on overnight loans that U.S. commercial banks make to one another. The law, as well as financial prudence, require commercial banks to maintain a certain minimum of ready money to cover their deposit liabilities. Many are surprised to learn that under the fractional reserve system, commercial banks maintain only enough cash on hand to redeem a small portion of the money the public has on deposit. If all depositors were to try to withdraw all their money at the same time, every bank would fail. The reason? Most of the money on deposit does not represent actual cash in the form of legal tender — bills and coins — but is imaginary money created by the banks themselves through their loans and discounts. To prevent collapse, a minimal cash amount backs up deposit liabilities.

Commercial banks are for-profit enterprises. To maximize profits, cash on hand is kept to a minimum as it earns no interest. To put it in more scientific terms: The cash commercial banks must keep on hand to redeem deposits does not entitle the bank’s shareholders to a portion of the unpaid labor — surplus value — performed by the working class.