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.
Category: Rate of Interest
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.
Liberation Day
On April 2, President Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs. As this blog concentrates on economic questions, this was the biggest event of the last month. But before I get to the tariff, I’ll look at other developments.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia lived and worked legally in Maryland since 2019. The Trump administration accused him of belonging to a gang, arrested and put him on a plane heading for a notoriously brutal El Salvadoran prison. He had not been convicted of any crime. They then claimed they’d committed an administrative mistake.
On April 10, the Supreme Court unanimously ordered the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. As of this writing (April 28), he remains imprisoned, and Trump has refused to follow the court’s order. [I wonder whether the high court regrets last year’s decision that even after leaving office, a president cannot be criminally prosecuted for any action taken while in office in pursuit of their duties? I don’t know the answer, but it seems the court is like a man sawing off the branch he is sitting on. -SW]
The Decline of Imperialist Democracy
As explained last month, Donald Trump kept his promise to end the genocidal military assault by the Zionist entity against Gaza. I will not call this a war. He then unveiled his own plan for “post-war” Gaza. Trump plans the permanent removal of 100% of the Palestinians from Gaza.
Who will replace them? Trump indicates that the U.S. itself would own Gaza, not Israel. Trump did not explain what this ownership means. Does it mean that U.S. businesses (including Trump’s family businesses) would build hotels and casinos to take advantage of Gaza’s beautiful Mediterranean climate? Or would Gaza become some sort of U.S. territory? He also implied that U.S. forces would replace Israeli forces, though he later walked that back claiming U.S. forces wouldn’t be needed in a Palestinian-free Gaza. (1)
Trump claimed Gaza Palestinians would be resettled at some beautiful place nearby, such as in Jordan or Egypt, though there were some stories it might be distant Indonesia. The governments of Jordan and Egypt expressed strong opposition to any forcible resettlement in their countries. His plan also raises questions about the future of West Bank Palestinians. Many of them, as in Gaza, are refugees from other parts of Palestine. Even before Israel began its genocide in October 2023, the Zionist entity was putting pressure on the West Bank — will the next step be to drive Palestinians out of there as well? Will the U.S. own the West Bank as well as Gaza?
Syria Falls to Pro-Imperialist Forces
On December 8, 2024, Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad’s government collapsed before an offensive of U.S.-backed HTS rebels. The rebels call themselves Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham [HTS, in English: Organization for the Liberation of the Levant].
Assad was forced to flee the country after the Syrian Arab army put up little resistance to the pro-U.S.-NATO rebel offensive, ultimately finding refuge in Russia. HTS’s central leader is Ahmed al Sharaa, also known as Abu Mohammad al Julani. HTS consider themselves Sunni Muslims strongly opposed to other Islamic sects, such as the Shia and Alawites, as well as to other religions, including Christians and Druze. According to the HTS, all these religions and sects worship the “one true God,” in the wrong way.
Previously, al Sharaa was a member of al-Qaeda, the group founded by Osama bin Laden — the same group credited with the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon building on 9/11/2001. The attacks killed thousands of people in the United States and were the declared target of George W. Bush’s “war on terror.” But times have changed, and today, HTS and al Sharaa are pictured by the imperialists and their media as moderates who can bring Western-style democracy and religious tolerance to the Syrian people.
When the media describes a group as moderate, it means they are doing what the U.S. imperialist world empire wants them to do. During the final days of the HTS advance to Damascus, the Israeli air force provided them with air support. U.S.-supplied Israeli forces bombed military bases and the headquarters of Syrian intelligence in the center of Damascus. The Israelis struck bases that housed Syrian troops and stockpiles of weapons that the Syrian army might have used to defend Damascus (this included the Mezzah Air Base).
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.”
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.
Corporate Joe on the Picket Line
Over the last month, the news in the U.S. (the world’s leading imperialist power) was dominated by three main stories. The first is the strikes against the Big Three automakers by the United Auto Workers (UAW). The second is the continued struggle of the Party of Order against the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump. As of early October 2023, Trump appears to have built a sizeable lead in the Republican primary, with all the other candidates fading fast. The third story was confined mainly to the financial pages but is of particular interest to the readers of this blog. That story is the crash of the U.S. government bond market.
A government bond crash gets much less attention than a stock market crash, though it’s really more important. A stock market crash lowers interest rates. Unless a recession is already underway — like the famous 1929 stock market crash — a crash that relaxes the money market and lowers interest can postpone a recession. This happened in the crash of October 1987, when it lowered interest rates and prolonged the ongoing economic expansion by several years.
While a government bond crash doesn’t prevent the federal government from continuing to borrow money (increasing the cost to the taxpayer), it does increase the interest rate that both businesses and consumers have to pay. For example, housing construction had been slumping but began to recover last summer as mortgage rates began to decline. This raised hopes for a “soft landing” of the U.S. and the world economy. But now mortgage interest rates are rising to their highest levels since before the 2007-09 crisis, and housing starts renewed their decline.
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?
A Critique of Crisis Theory 