Analyzing Currency Circulation

On May 20, a ceasefire was announced between the Hamas-led government of Gaza and Israel. The truce followed an 11-day pounding of Gaza’s 2 million-plus residents by Israeli bombers and rockets. Residents of Gaza, described as the world’s largest open-air prison, are not allowed to leave. According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, total deaths among Gaza residents — or perhaps we should say inmates — were at least 248. Of these, 39 were women and 66 were children. An additional 1,910 people were wounded. According to UN officials as a result of the Israeli assault, 800,000 people in Gaza do not have access to clean water. All of this is amid the COVID-19 pandemic, which has swept through Gaza as it has through the rest of the world.

According to the Israeli government, Israeli casualties from rockets fired from Gaza include 12 deaths, of which two were children. Israel is well supplied by the United States with bombers and highly accurate computer-guided missiles, while Gaza residents have only highly inaccurate missiles that can only be shot in the general direction of their targets. In addition, most of the Gazan missiles have been shot down by the Israeli military using the U.S.-provided Iron Dome anti-missile system. As a result, physical damage done to Israel by Gazan missiles has been minimal.

The accuracy of the U.S.-provided bombs and missiles is illustrated by the destruction of a Gaza high-rise that housed both the Al Jazeera news agency and the U.S.-based Associated Press. The Israeli government gave journalists minutes to leave claiming that the building was being used by Hamas, the elected governing party in Gaza. However, AP claimed there was no evidence that Hamas used the building.

What is true is that the high-rise provided an excellent view of Gaza and therefore of the toll the Israeli assault was taking on the besieged city. Perhaps the Israelis were more concerned about Al Jazeera than they were about AP. Still, the attack on the building was a clear attack by the Israeli government on journalists and freedom of the press.

AP was therefore forced to protest. However, the next day AP under right-wing pressure fired an American journalist, Emily Wilder, for pro-Palestinian tweets when she was a college student as if that is a crime. Wilder was active as a college student in the Jewish Voice for Peace and so happens to be Jewish.

She is not alone in the American Jewish community. Increasingly, younger Jews have come to oppose the actions of the Israeli government, which claims to represent all Jews, including those who do not live or wish to live in Israel, but not its Arab citizens. Most of the American Jewish community opposed the administration of Donald Trump, not least because Trump’s racist demagoguery was reminiscent of the ideology that eventually led to the Third Reich in Germany. Indeed, extreme antisemitism is widespread among Trump’s supporters.

This did not prevent Trump from claiming that he was the most pro-Israel president ever. He pointed to his decision to move the U.S. embassy from Tel-Aviv to Jerusalem. The former president when speaking to Jewish-American organizations repeatedly described Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “your prime minister,” which drew protests even from docile (to American imperialism) pro-Zionist Jewish organizations. This did not prevent these same organizations from coming out once again in support of the latest Israeli war against the Palestinian people.

Netanyahu and most of the Israeli population, in contrast, strongly supported Trump. The racist rhetoric of the former — and possible future — U.S. president was music to their ears. The latest crisis broke out when the Israeli government moved to evict some four Palestinian families from their East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah to make room for Jewish settlers in the historically Arab area. The Zionist propaganda machine claimed that this was a routine eviction case involving the fact that the Arab residents had not paid rent for 39 years to Jewish landlords who the Zionists claim had owned the apartments since the 1870s.

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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.

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