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.

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.

How Vietnam Won, Part 1

On January 14, 2024, 400,000 pro-Palestinian anti-genocide demonstrators marched in Washington, D.C., to the White House (occupied by the Democrat President “Genocide Joseph Biden”). Tens of thousands more marched in support of Gaza in San Francisco, California, the following day.

The stakes could not be higher. Those of us living in the United States have a special responsibility to do all we can to force the government to halt its support to Israel. Though it is the Israeli government carrying out the genocide on the ground, it could not commit these nightmarish crimes without the financial, political, military, and moral support provided by the government headed by Genocide Joe.

The genocide — there is no other word for it — has continued without let-up in Gaza. Israel aims to kill people directly or through hunger and disease, then drive out the rest of the population as far away as possible from Palestine. The January 3 edition of the Middle East Monitor reports, “According to the Times of Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition is discreetly exploring the acceptance of thousands of migrants from Gaza, with the Democratic Republic of Congo being one of the countries under consideration. ‘Congo will be willing to take in migrants,’ said a senior source in the security cabinet, ‘and we’re in talks with others.’”

Can the Palestinians Win?

The year 2023 was dominated by Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza beginning in October. It was supposedly in response to the Operation Al-Aqsa Flood attack on Israel by Hamas [Islamic Resistance Organization] and other Palestinian resistance organizations on October 7, 2023. Many so-called liberals, progressives, socialists, and even some Marxists have attacked the alleged excesses Palestinian fighters committed, such as beheading Israeli babies, raping Israeli women, kidnapping children, etc. Many of these claims of excesses have since been discredited. These “progressives” claim they sympathize with the Palestine people in their struggle against Israeli apartheid. But they then lecture that the Palestinians must conduct their struggle without violence or harm to “innocent Israeli civilians.”

It’s now clear that many of the civilian deaths were the result of the Israeli army itself firing into areas that were allegedly occupied by Palestinian fighters and their Israeli captives. Our “liberal” friends insist there is still a residue of Palestinian excess. But how could it be otherwise, considering how Zionists have treated the Palestinian people for the last 75+ years? Before October 7, there was the day before. Yet the so-called friends of the Palestinians insist we in the West must equally condemn Palestinian excesses, real or alleged, and Israel’s crimes. They want to support only a “pure” national liberation struggle without any “excesses.” In other words, they do not support any national liberation struggles at all!

They argue that today’s Palestinian liberation movement is dominated not by secular democrats like the Palestinian Liberation Organization of the past that fought for a secular democratic state for all of Palestine’s residents. The PLO’s program included the separation of church and state with equal rights for Christians, Muslims, and Jews to practice their respective religions. This is what these “friends” support as an alternative to Zionist apartheid with Judaism as the state religion.

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).

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.

Written and Unwritten Laws

On August 1, 2023, a Washington, D.C., grand jury, at the urging of special prosecutor Jack Smith, indicted Donald Trump on four felony counts. The counts center on Trump’s illegal attempts to remain in office after he’d clearly lost the 2020 presidential election in both the popular vote and, what legally counts, the electoral college. On August 15, a Georgia grand jury indicted Trump and 18 supporters on racketeering charges. The charges involve the alleged attempt by Trump and his supporters to steal Georgia’s electoral vote and, in effect, suppress the African American vote. More on this in coming posts as the situation unfolds.

As I explained last month, in the U.S., the transfer of power from one president to the next involves both written and unwritten laws. One unwritten law is that the defeated presidential candidate, either Democrat or Republican, concedes the election after The New York Times declares their opponent the winner in the electoral college. The defeated candidate then offers their support to the new president-elect. Trump defied this law. Instead of congratulating Joseph Biden, the electoral college winner — and the popular vote winner — Trump claimed he had won the election by a “landslide” and that the official vote tallies were false. Many of Trump’s Republican supporters, as well as some non-supporters who needed the votes of his base to win their reelection — claim that Trump’s latest federal indictment, as well as the latest indictment in the State of Georgia, is an attack against the right of free speech.

Now it’s true that the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment guarantees the right to free speech. U.S. residents and citizens have the right to lie, except to police officers, federal agents, or under oath. They do have the right to refuse to talk to police officers and federal agents under the Fifth Amendment, which protects persons from having to provide testimony against themselves. Police officers and federal agents, though, have the right to lie to suspects, though not the right to lie to jurors — which, of course, doesn’t mean they never do. This is one reason why defense attorneys are almost unanimous in advising people to never talk to a police officer or federal agent in the absence of an attorney.

Whip of Hunger, part 2

As May drew toward its end, the media was full of reports that the world economy was teetering on the edge of catastrophe. If the media is to be believed, the threat came not from the unsold commodities that accumulated due to the COVID aftermath boom. Rather, they said that unless the Democrats and Republicans reached a last-minute agreement to raise the debt limit, the government will be forced into default as the Treasury runs out of money.

In last month’s post, I declared that this crisis was fake. Sure enough, “at the last minute,” the crisis was averted. On Saturday, June 3, President Biden signed the compromise agreement allowing the government to keep borrowing into 2025. The compromise bill sailed through the House of Representatives with 314 voting yes and 117 voting no. In the Senate, the vote was 63-to-36. No small portion of that borrowed money will go to servicing federal government debt, the bulk of which is owned by wealthy capitalists.

Karl Marx on the national debt

Karl Marx wrote:

“The only part of the so-called national wealth that actually enters into the collective possessions of modern peoples is their national debt. Hence, as a necessary consequence, the modern doctrine that a nation becomes the richer the more deeply it is in debt. Public credit becomes the credo of capital. And with the rise of national debt-making, want of faith in the national debt takes the place of the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, which may not be forgiven.” (Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 31, Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist)

Trump Charged

On April 4 in New York City, former President Donald Trump was arraigned in court on 34 felony charges brought by the State of New York — not the Federal Government. He became the first president to be charged with crimes — felonies — after leaving office. In the United States, arraignment is when the charges are read, detailing the laws allegedly violated. Then, the defendant enters a plea, guilty or not guilty (Trump pleaded not guilty). He was released without bail and promptly flew on his private jet to his luxurious home — one of many — at the Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, near Miami.

Even if Trump is found guilty by a jury — which wouldn’t be until 2024 at the earliest — he would not be barred under law from again running for or serving as president. Eugene Debs, the Socialist Party presidential candidate, ran from his prison cell in 1920. Trump is the opposite of Debs in terms of the class he represents, in morality, and in almost every other way. It’s hard to imagine the 2024 Republican nominee running from prison! Nobody expects Trump to serve a minute in prison even if convicted of every count and all appeals fail. The point of the charges isn’t to put him in prison but to keep him out of the White House.

Many liberal and progressive observers delighted to see Trump charged are dubious that these charges will stick. The charges of falsifying business records are misdemeanors under New York State law, not felonies. In the Clinton impeachment of 1998, the underlying crime involved an affair with someone, not his wife. Bill Clinton had an affair with young aide Monica Lewinsky. From a purely moral standpoint, Clinton’s affair with the young aide was worse than Trump’s affair with porn star Stormy Daniels who is well-versed in the ways of the world.