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.

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).

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!

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.

Ukraine War

In this post, I had hoped to concentrate on the COVID aftermath boom, inflation, the Federal Reserve System monetary policy, and the growing threat of a deep recession.

But events in Ukraine do not permit this. Even if the Russo-Ukrainian conflict doesn’t spiral into a world war, the U.S. world empire has launched an economic war that is already having a major impact on the development of the global economy.

The most extensive propaganda campaign against any nation occurring within recent memory is blaring out of every media outlet — printed, digital, radio, and TV. Some examples of the propaganda tricks employed include glaring headlines declaring as fact what a close reading of the article reveals as claims of the government or Pentagon.

Putting monopoly super-profits over human lives

The 2020 recession was more than the usual cyclical downturn. There were, however, signs a cyclical recession was developing before the COVID-19 pandemic hit with full force in March 2020. Industrial production in most countries had already ceased to rise. The U.S. Federal Reserve System had already initiated an “easing” cycle in an attempt to contain the incipient downturn. That was the situation when it became impossible to deny that the COVID pandemic was rapidly spreading in the United States and around the world.

As the reality of the deadly global pandemic became widely known, the travel, hotel and hospitality industries came to a grinding halt. Many other industries were devastated. As people were forced to hunker down across the globe, both the production of surplus value and its realization were sharply curtailed. As sales of commodities plummeted, the velocity of circulation of the currency dropped drastically. This meant that a given quantity of currency generated far less monetarily effective demand than it would under normal recession conditions.

Eager to get both the production of surplus value and its realization back to normal, capitalist politicians, most notoriously former President Donald Trump, pushed for “reopening” the economy. Trump originally set a target of Easter 2020 for the reopening! So began a cycle of premature “re-openings,” followed by rising COVID cases, hospitalizations, and deaths to new highs leading to renewed, if ever more limited, shutdowns.

Among the countries that dealt with the pandemic the worst was the world’s richest country, the United States. In no other country in the world does the capitalist class have more unbridled power. Business pushed for the fastest reopening possible so that normal profit-making could resume. President Trump was more than willing to oblige since he had planned to pitch his reelection campaign around the theme that the U.S. was experiencing “the greatest economy ever.” Democrats and Republicans competed with one another on who could reopen their state and local economies fastest. As a result, the total number of official U.S. COVID-19 deaths now approaches 600,000. Worldwide, more than 3 million people and rising have died.

Brianna Griffith, writing in the online socialist publication Liberation News, reported: “India, South Africa and 80 other countries proposed a temporary waiver of the Trade-Related Aspects of International Property agreement on patents. The proposal was blocked in February by the United States, European Union, United Kingdom, Japan, and Australia. It is also opposed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Pfizer, BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson — key beneficiaries that stand to profit immensely from global suffering.”

So far, the Biden administration, just like its notorious predecessor, prefers to safeguard the monopoly super-profits of big pharmaceutical companies holding the patents on the lifesaving vaccines. The result is that less vaccine is being produced than would be the case without the state-enforced monopolistic profit protection for “Big Pharma,” and the vaccines being produced are selling at prices far above their prices of production.

The greater the price of a vaccine relative to its price of production, the harder it is for governments to find the money to purchase it and the greater the number of preventable deaths and serious illnesses. Naturally, the people of the most exploited countries and classes in the world are hit the hardest. (3 ) Therefore, safeguarding the patents of the drug companies begun under Trump and continuing under Biden is not just a policy of putting profits over people but rather putting super-profits above human lives.

Commodity Money Versus Non-Commodity Money

On March 11, President Joseph Biden signed into law a $1.9 trillion package called the Coronavirus Relief bill. It provides for $300-a-week extra in unemployment insurance payments — only half the original $600 provided by the CARES Act passed last year — and only until Sept. 6. It also provides $25 billion for rental relief and utility assistance and $350 billion relief for hard-pressed state and local and Native American tribal governments.

The bill includes a one-time $1,400 payment for low- and middle-income Americans. Also, $20 billion will be spent on COVID-19 vaccinations. Democrats are especially proud of a provision that extends for a year a child tax credit that was part of the CARES Act. They claim this will reduce child poverty in the richest nation in the world by one-half. This tells you a lot about the nature of the U.S. tax system, which pushes many children of working-class families below the official federal poverty line while allowing billionaires like former President Trump as well as giant corporations like Apple to get away with paying virtually no taxes.

Progressives were hoping that the stimulus bill would have a provision raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour from the current $7.25. This was important because the bizarre and undemocratic rules that govern the U.S. Senate mean only a few bills can be passed through a process known as “budgetary reconciliation” with a simple majority vote. All other bills need the support of 60 senators. This means that given the composition of the current Senate, 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans with Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris casting the tie-breaking vote, the GOP has veto power over most other proposed legislation coming up this session.

For the minimum wage hike to have had any chance of passing in the current session, it would have been necessary to include it in the stimulus bill. President Biden gave lip service to the proposed minimum wage hike but failed to push it. This gave the green light to conservative Democrats to ally with the GOP to exclude the $15-an-hour minimum wage from the bill — effectively killing it. This is the exact outcome the capitalists wanted. Once again, the Democrats and Republicans working together delivered the goods for capital.

The Current Industrial Cycle (Pt 3)

A deepening political crisis

On Aug. 23, African-American Jacob Blake was shot in the back by police seven times in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Blake is expected to survive but is paralyzed from the waist down. This latest police outrage triggered a wave of demonstrations by the Black Lives Matter movement in Kenosha and elsewhere. Two days later, a Trump supporter and police wannabe named Kyle Rittenhouse shot to death two Black Lives Matter protesters with a rifle he was carrying. Rittenhouse, who lives in Illinois, is a member of a fascist militia group that came to Kenosha for the announced purpose of defending the property of business owners from Black Lives Matter protesters.

The cops were seen thanking the fascists and offering them water. After Rittenhouse killed the two protesters, he walked up to the cops with his hands up. However, the guardians of “law and order” refused to arrest him. He was finally arrested and charged with murder only after he returned to Illinois. U.S. President Donald Trump then weighed in. Trump defended the young fascist killer claiming that Rittenhouse faced certain death if he had not acted to defend himself. Trump also attacked the alleged violence of “left-wing” — Black Lives Matter — protesters but defended the violence of Rittenhouse and other murderous right-wing counter-protesters.

My rant in place of the regularly scheduled post

The next post will have to be delayed a week and I owe my readers an explanation. I realized after a little thought that this “explanation” is an opportunity to examine some of the economic laws we have been exploring throughout this blog.

In the early hours of Sunday, Aug. 16, a rare summertime cluster of thunderstorms, spun off one of the many tropical storms popping up like mushrooms this year due to global warming, swept the Bay Area in California where I live. Awakened by the storm, I noticed my clock radio was out indicating the power had failed. Normally, when the power fails it comes back on in a few hours at worst. I assumed that the power would be back on by the time the sun came up in the morning, or in the worst case shortly thereafter. The longest power outage I have experienced here was in December 1995 when a violent winter storm with near-hurricane-force winds caused the power to fail early in the evening. But even then the power came back on around dawn. Surely, I assumed, this power outage wouldn’t last longer than the one associated with the 1995 storm. I was wrong.

The block where I live seems to be prone to power outages. The power frequently fails for a few hours during winter storms, and sometimes it will go out when there is no storm or earthquake or for any other obvious reason while it stays on in surrounding blocks. Clearly, there is some weakness in the power delivery system for my block that has persisted over many years and Pacific Gas and Electric has done nothing to repair. Without power, I lose access to the Internet and thus normal fact-checking. With my laptop, I can still type, of course, but only at the cost of running down the battery. If the battery runs out of juice, I have no computer at all until the power comes back on.

The power finally came back on Monday morning but my schedule was in ruins. I have little reason to complain about what was personally a minor inconvenience and nothing more. In areas of the U.S. hit by major hurricanes and floods, power outages can last for weeks. And in many countries oppressed by U.S. imperialism, power might be on for only a few hours a day even under normal circumstances. However, there is a broader story here, far more important than some minor personal inconvenience that in and of itself would not be worth writing about.

The Crisis (Pt 7)

An unprecedented crisis

The current economic crisis has many unprecedented features. Most importantly, it was triggered by a pandemic and the resulting business shutdowns and stay-at-home orders. This led to a sharp decline in the sale of commodities. The result has been a collapse of industrial production, world trade, and employment over a period of a few weeks that is unparalleled in the history of capitalism. Because nothing like this had ever happened before, it is extremely difficult to predict what will happen next.

For example, we don’t know the future course of the pandemic as capitalist governments move, even as the pandemic continues, to lift the shutdowns of nonessential businesses and stay-at-home orders. Will these moves to “reopen the economy for business” cause the pandemic to accelerate? Or will the pandemic decline in the Northern Hemisphere, where the largest capitalist economies are located, as summer conditions set in? Many virus-caused diseases decline in the summer months and accelerate in the fall and winter. Will COVID-19 follow a similar pattern?

Even if we assume the pandemic peters out over the (Northern Hemisphere) summer and doesn’t come back this fall/winter, an extremely optimistic and experts say unwarranted assumption, will the U.S. and world economy revive rapidly in a so-called V-shaped recovery? Or will the recovery be slow and torturous, with Depression levels of unemployment lingering on for years? Or will it be something in between?