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).

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 Fate of Rafah

As I write these lines on Feb. 25, 2024, the immediate future of the genocide waged by Israel against the people of the Gaza Strip is coming down to the fate of the small southern city of Rafah. The vast majority of Gazans have been rendered homeless, as Israel’s bombing campaign has destroyed or made uninhabitable most of the housing stock of what was Gaza City as well as the rest of the strip.

Since October, Gaza’s people have been crowded into the city of Rafah along the border with Egypt. In the next few weeks, the question is whether Israel will destroy Rafah, killing or driving out its population, or will Israel be forced to accept a temporary ceasefire. Without a ceasefire, the effects of the bombing and other military actions, plus thirst, hunger, and disease, will kill Gazans or force them out of Palestine altogether. A ceasefire would buy time and pressure the U.S.-led imperialists to allow aid to reach the people so they can stay alive and keep fighting to stay and rebuild in the future. But this presents a danger to Israel.

The danger is when the war — if this kind of genocide can be called a war — ends in some kind of ceasefire — those who’ve survived it will still be in place, fighting and eventually liberating their entire homeland. This would be a defeat for Israel and its aim of transforming itself from the settler colony it is today into a real nation along the lines of Canada, Australia, or the United States. These nations began as settler colonies but became nations, in part, by crushing the native population.

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.

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.

Economic Prospects

Three factors shape the current global economic conjuncture.

The first is the sluggish but long rise in the capitalist global industrial cycle following the world economic crisis of 2007-09. This rise continued until February 2020.

The second factor is the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic that shut down large parts of the global economy and world trade in 2020. This sent unemployment rates into double digits. The West’s capitalist governments increasingly treat COVID-19 as endemic rather than a pandemic. Shutdowns are over and even mask-wearing is becoming a thing of the past. But the virus continues. On-and-off shutdowns continue in the world’s leading manufacturing nation: China.

The third factor is the global economic and financial war launched by the U.S. world empire against Russia. This war was formally launched in response to the Russo-Ukrainian war, ongoing since the U.S.-supported right-wing Euromaidan coup in 2014. It entered a new stage with Moscow’s launching of a special military operation on Feb. 24, 2022. The war had already taken about 15,000 people’s lives before the military operation began. Fighting was limited in recent years, but in the weeks leading up to Feb. 24 Kiev stepped up shelling the Donbass. All indications are Washington encouraged its puppet Euromaidan government to launch an offensive to crush the ethnically Russian People’s Republics of Lugansk and Donetsk.

A return to austerity

On June 23, President Joseph Biden announced a bi-partisan deal between the Democrats and “moderate” Senate Republicans to pass a $953 billion infrastructure plan, which includes only $559 billion in new spending. This was a small fraction of Biden’s original promise to push for a $4 trillion infrastructure plan. Biden claims he still seeks to pass his original plan. But considering the GOP’s virtual veto power in the U.S. Congress, the plan seems as good as dead. It is worth noting that the $953 billion compromise contains none of the “green energy” proposals that were part of the original plan.

What the bipartisan deal does include is “asset-recycling,” which had also been central to Trump’s infrastructure plans. Under “asset-recycling,” the federal government borrows money at high interest rates from private for-profit companies that the federal government depends on to build infrastructure projects. As collateral on the loans, the companies take possession of roads, bridges, and other public works for the life of the loan — about 30 years.

The private companies then set up toll booths on previously public roads and bridges that the federal government has leased to them as collateral, in effect treating them as their private property until the loans are repaid with interest. The public is skinned twice, once through paying off the loans and the interest on the loans as taxpayers, and second through paying tolls on previously public roads and bridges. The government then uses the borrowed money to carry out other parts of the infrastructure plan.

The proposed “compromise” with the GOP on infrastructure is typical of Joseph Biden’s 50-year-long political career in the service of U.S. capital. The “compromise” is so reactionary that members of the “progressive” Justice Democrat faction of the Democratic Party in Congress threaten to vote against it.

Earlier this year, it was widely believed in progressive circles that the Biden administration was breaking with decades of neoliberal austerity policies and returning to full-blooded “Keynesianism” of the “golden years” of the 1950s and 1960s. The $4 trillion infrastructure plan was supposed to mark the definitive end of the neo-liberal policies that have dominated Washington’s policies since the “Volcker shock” under Carter and then the election of Ronald Reagan some 40 years ago.

Progressives were hoping that a massive “Keynesian” public works program would bring about a return of the kind of full-blooded capitalist prosperity not seen in decades. True, the Biden administration did restore half of the $600 a week in extra unemployment benefits the U.S. government under Donald Trump instituted in the spring (northern hemisphere) of 2020 but then allowed to run out after a few months. And this spring, the Biden administration mailed out $1,400 checks to all “legal” adult working-class and lower-middle-class U.S. residents. It also granted temporary tax relief to families raising young children.

Since it took office on Jan. 20, the Biden administration has been running down the U.S. government’s swollen checking account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. This has allowed the U.S. government to slow the rate at which it has been borrowing money, allowing long-term interest rates to dip in recent months.

Hence, a huge amount of purchasing power has been pumped into the U.S. and world capitalist economy in the opening months of the Biden administration. As a result, according to the U.S. Labor Department, total employment rose 850,000 in June. For the first time in months, this number met the expectation of economic pundits. But maintaining this economic momentum long enough to set off a sustained rise in the industrial cycle capable of restoring old-time capitalist prosperity is another matter entirely.

The U.S. capitalists claim they are facing a huge labor shortage even as employment remains millions below the level that prevailed in February 2020 just before COVID-19 hit with full force. However, the capitalists’ complaints about the “labor shortage” are having their effect on government policy in the U.S., at both the federal and state levels.

Republican state governments have already ended the expanded unemployment benefits, while the Democrat-run government of California has announced that people must now give evidence that they are actively seeking employment or lose benefits. This occurs even as COVID-19 cases are once again rising, especially among the unvaccinated or partially vaccinated. In September, the extended unemployment benefits are scheduled to run out entirely. There is virtually no chance in light of the alleged “labor shortage” being trumpeted by the media that the extra benefits will be extended.

Nor is there much chance in light of the “labor shortage” of any more stimulus checks. The mailing out of additional stimulus checks would encourage workers to hold out for wages and working conditions higher than the bosses are offering. The capitalists are therefore using their control over both the Democrats and the Republicans to make sure there are no more stimulus checks.

In addition, the U.S. Treasury is nearing the end of the rundown of its checking account at the New York Fed. As the account balance shrinks, either U.S. government borrowing will have to rise once again, which will renew upward pressure on interest rates, or government spending will have to fall, or some combination of the above. This means that U.S. fiscal policy will be a great deal less expansionary beginning in the second half of 2021 and beyond than it was in the first half of the year.

The drift back to the fiscal austerity typical of post-Volcker shock neo-liberalism almost certainly means that the rate of economic growth and with it the rise in employment will soon be slowing down.