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: Russia
Artificial Intelligence
On August 15, 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska. Alaska was once a Russian colony that was purchased by the U.S. in 1867 and became a state in 1959.
The anti-imperialist YouTuber Brian Berletic expressed concern that the Trump administration might attempt to kidnap Putin. This did not seem so far-fetched in light of the Israeli-U.S. attack on Iran aimed at decapitating Iran’s political and military leadership. This occurred as they were supposed to engage in negotiations to normalize relations. Unlike Iran, Russia has nuclear weapons and the ability to deliver them to the U.S. mainland, making any kidnap attempt unlikely, and Putin returned home safely.
Trump has refused to walk away from the Russo-Ukrainian war, and there were no breakthroughs in ending it. The war started with the 2014 U.S.-organized right-wing coup to overthrow the popularly elected Ukrainian government of Viktor Yanukovych. Coup leaders, called the Euromaidan movement, were supported by a coalition of pro-U.S. imperialist liberals and Ukrainian fascists who provided the muscle power.
The Economic Outlook for 2023
As the new year begins, there is cautious optimism on Wall Street that the Federal Reserve will continue to moderate or perhaps reverse its moves to raise the federal funds rate. The Fed’s policies of increasing the rate target have led to expectations that a recession with rising unemployment will develop. What is the federal funds rate, and what is its relationship to the chances of a 2023 recession?
Federal law requires that commercial banks keep a certain amount of ready cash on hand either in the form of legal tender currency — paper money and coins — or deposits in one of twelve district Federal Reserve Banks making up the Federal Reserve System. The federal funds rate is the interest rate on loans commercial banks make to other commercial banks overnight.
When a bank is short of legally required cash reserves, it borrows from other banks that have a surplus over the legally required minimum. The money market is said to be tightening when the rate is rising. When the rate is declining, the money market is said to be easing. A tightening market precedes a recession, while an easing market points to an economic recovery. The Open Market Committee of the Federal Reserve System (today headed by Chairman Jerome Powell) — through the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — sets a target range for this interest rate, called “fed funds.” The fed funds target is currently between 4.25% and 4.50%.
The Dollar System Shows its Fangs
On October 5, an article by Shawgi Tell appeared in the online publication “Dissident Voice” titled “The Rich and their Media Offer No Solutions to Economic Problems.”
Tell writes: “False choices, bad options, and mixed messages abound. Week after week, one news source claims that everything is great while another says that the economic forecast looks gloomy for the next decade. Economic concepts like inflation, interest rates, costs, prices, and unemployment are rendered in the most tortured manner over and over again, with different representatives of the rich constantly making unscientific and confusing claims about what is ‘the real problem’ and how to ‘get us back on track.’”
Anybody trying to make sense of what is happening in the economy by reading the analysis in the media will be hopelessly confused. For example, we are told the Labor Department reported that 263,000 jobs were created in September. While reported as fact, this figure is only an estimate. The media indicates that job creation slowed last month from the month before but not enough to prevent the stock market from falling sharply on the day the unemployment figures came out. Wall Street knows that under current circumstances, as long as employment continues to rise, so will interest rates.
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.
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.
Perfect Competition
In January of this year, the U.S. government and its media claimed an invasion of Ukraine by Russia was imminent. One version of the media reports raised fears that Ukraine is only the initial target — first crush Ukraine, then march all the way to the Atlantic. In rhetoric akin to that of the Cold War, when it was said the Soviet army was threatening to invade Western Europe, now Russian President Vladimir Putin is cast as the aggressor.
We know this isn’t true. The Russian economy, devastated by 30 years of capitalist counterrevolution and only partially recovered from capitalism’s restoration in the 1990s, is in no position to support aggressive military campaigns. Russia may have moved about 100,000 troops closer to the Ukrainian border. This would be a defensive move to prevent increased warfare from spilling over into Russia proper. If not for an invasion, what explains the Russian troop movements?
The real story: U.S. imperialism is moving to consolidate domination of Ukraine. Ukraine is rich in agricultural lands and fossil fuels. Adolf Hitler had his eyes on the country as a key to his vision for an Eastern European empire. Ukraine is an important acquisition for a U.S. world empire as well.
The United States established its current domination by orchestrating the 2014 EuroMadian coup, spearheaded by Ukrainian fascists. This overthrew the corrupt capitalist, but elected, government of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych (1950- ). But two areas in eastern Ukraine refused to accept the coup. They are now under control of the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic. Another region that escaped is Crimea. Ignoring this region’s real history, the U.S. media paints a completely false picture of what really happened there.
Political and Economic Crises (Pt 15)
Trump orders assassination of top Iranian general
On Jan. 2, 2020, Donald Trump ordered a drone strike that the next day assassinated among others General Qassem Soleimani, considered Iran’s leading general and one of the most powerful and popular leaders of the Islamic Republic. Soleimani was killed at the Baghdad airport while on a diplomatic mission aimed at improving relations among Iran on one side and Saudi Arabia and the United States on the other. The murder of such an important military and political leader while on a peaceful diplomatic mission has few if any precedents in the history of diplomatic relations stretching back over thousands of years. Rather, Trump’s action is straight out of the history of the 20th-century New York mob.
This has brought the U.S. to the brink of full-scale military war with Iran, and frankly, as I write these lines it is hard to see how this war can be avoided. The U.S. is already at war with Iran in the economic and political sense. Iraq’s Parliament has now demanded that the U.S. withdraw its 5,000 troops in the country, which are supposedly there to fight ISIS, though the U.S. has announced it has now “suspended” its war with ISIS.
Trump responded by saying he will refuse this demand unless Iraq repays the U.S. for the “aid” it has given Iraq and threatened Iraq with vicious sanctions if it does not withdraw the demand. For its part, Iran has announced it is finally pulling out of the nuclear accord it signed under Obama that exchanged intrusive inspections for promises by the U.S. and its imperialist satellites to relax economic sanctions — dial back economic warfare. These events have raised the chilling possibility that the year 2020 could be for this century what 1914 was to the last.
Trump’s action should remove the illusions shared apparently by the government of Russia and even a few progressives that, however racist and reactionary he is, in other ways Trump is part of some right-wing “isolationist” anti-war tradition that opposes the “Wilsonian” imperialism that has long dominated the Democratic Party, and since at least 1940 the Republican Party as well. In reality, Trump’s economic and political nationalism has always pointed in the direction of war, not peace, whether Trump personally wants war or not. History shows that the beginning of a major war brings with it a “rallying around the commander in chief.” Such an effect could considerably increase Trump’s chances of reelection. True, as the experience of many countries shows, as wars drag on public support for the war and the government turns into its opposite. But by then, Trump may be thinking, the election of 2020 will be far behind him.
In general, there seems to be an unofficial rule that U.S. presidents don’t start major military campaigns in election years. Otherwise, every president facing dubious reelection prospects would be tempted to start a war. But Trump’s Bonapartist and autocratic tendencies mean that he does not feel bound by such a rule, any more than he feels bound by the rule that the president should not criticize the Federal Reserve System.
However, while Trump’s unstable personality and autocratic tendencies are extremely dangerous factors in the current crisis, it is not the main factor behind the current war danger. The roots of the current war crisis can be traced back to George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq — supported by Democratic Senators Hillary Clinton and Joseph Biden — on March 19, 2003. The Bush administration intended to create a new Iraqi puppet government that would provide a thin veneer over what would amount to U.S. colonial control of Iraq.
Political and Economic Crises (Pt 14)
The Democrats’ impeachment of Donald Trump
The public impeachment inquiry hearings held in November by the Democratic majority in the U.S. House of Representatives brought into the open the increasingly bitter rift between Donald Trump on one side and the professional apparatus of U.S. imperialism on the other. Left in the lurch was the Republican faction of the “Party of Order.”
Witnesses called by the Democrats were members of the imperialist apparatus — called the “deep state” by some. These include diplomats such as former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, Russian “expert” Fiona Hill, military officer and White House National Security advisor lieutenant-colonel Alexander Vindman, among others. These people have all made careers advancing the interest of U.S. imperialism and its world empire.
The impeachment inquiry finally allowed these men and women in the “trenches” of the U.S. world empire to unveil their bitterness and even hatred of Trump and his aides such as his personal attorney and former Republican Mayor of New York Rudy Guiliani. For these “professionals,” Trump, Guiliani and the others are corrupt blundering amateurs who are in well over their depth when it comes to defending the interests of U.S. imperialism.
Political and Economic Crises (Pt 13)
Trump faces impeachment
On Oct. 31, 2019, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution by a vote of 232 to 196 that established procedures for the ongoing impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump. No articles of impeachment — equivalent to counts in a criminal case — have been passed or even drawn up against Trump. The resolution only establishes the technical procedures under which the impeachment probe in the House will proceed.
The vote was almost entirely along party lines. Two Democrats who come from districts that went for Trump in 2016 voted against the proposed procedures. One congressman, who was until recently a right-wing Republican but is now strongly anti-Trump and calls himself an independent, voted for the resolution.
The vote indicates that Trump will probably be impeached in the House. It is possible that new revelations about Trump’s conduct in office could cause — or provide a pretext for — the Republicans to turn on Trump, forcing him to resign or be removed by a vote of two-thirds of the Senate. This is what happened in August 1974 during the Nixon impeachment crisis. But at this time it appears a long shot. Assuming that Trump is acquitted as expected in a Senate trial, he will be in office until Jan. 20, 2020 — or until Jan. 20, 2024, if he wins a second term.
A Critique of Crisis Theory 