Political and Economic Crises (Pt 9)

Scandals that rocked the Trump administration this month included sex scandals involving both the current president and former President Bill Clinton. Another scandal involved “detention centers” for immigrants, which are finally being called by their right name — concentration camps. The prisoners held in these camps are desperate people — men, women, children and infants — forced to flee desperate conditions in Central America created by U.S. imperialism under both Republicans and Democrats.

Particularly outrageous is the detention of children and even infants, who are held in cages and go without basic medical care (resulting in some children dying in the camps), toothbrushes, and bathing. The conditions in which these concentration camp victims are held would be scandalous even if they involved adult prisoners convicted after fair trials of terrible crimes. When the victims are children and infants, even the term popularized after the post-WWII Nuremberg Trials of German Nazi leaders for “crimes against humanity” seems somehow trite.

Trump supporters claim it is outrageous to call the detention centers concentration camps, pointing out there are no gas chambers or crematoria in these camps. This much is true. However, there were no gas chambers or crematoria in the Nazi concentration camps of the 1930s. There were also no children in the 1930s-era Nazi concentration camps. That did not prevent the Nazi government, which originally held “only” adult Communists, trade unionists, and some Social Democrats in “protective custody,” from calling them concentration camps. It was only during World War II that non-political women, children and infants — most Jews and Roma people — were taken to concentration camps equipped with gas chambers and crematoria.

As these revelations became known, a growing movement has emerged demanding that the concentration camps be shut down. On July 12, reports circulated that ICE, the U.S. federal secret police agency in charge of enforcing immigration laws, were planning massive raids on Sunday, July 14. In response, a series of demonstrations swept the U.S. demanding that the concentration camps be shut down and immigrants be allowed to stay.

Political and Economic Crises (Pt 8)

Trade war intensifies as U.S. and world economy slows

The last month has been characterized by a major escalation of the trade war with the People’s Republic of China. In another important but largely overlooked development, Trump also increased tariffs on imports from India, opening yet another front in the expanding trade war.

Trump threatened but did not impose tariffs on imports from Mexico if the Mexican government did not curb the flow of Central American immigrants through its territory to the U.S. This allowed Trump to “energize” members of his racist base concerned that the U.S. is ceasing to be a “white country.” The moves against Mexico illustrate the current phase of imperialism, and I will examine the Mexican situation more closely next month.

All this has occurred against the backdrop of a global economic slowdown. “Sales of new U.S. single-family homes,” Reuters reported, “fell from near an 11-1/2-year high in April as prices rebounded and manufacturing activity hit its lowest level in almost a decade in May, suggesting a sharp slowdown in economic growth was underway.”

This confirms what I wrote last month about the inventory buildup that helped boost the annualized GDP rate of growth to 3.2 percent, signaling a slowing, not accelerating, U.S. economy. The White House and much of the media — especially in the headlines — gave the misleading impression that the GDP report indicated that the U.S. economy was accelerating and the recession danger was fading away.

Political and Economic Crises (Pt 6)

Storm over the Federal Reserve System

U.S. President Donald Trump has indicated that he will nominate right-wing economic commentator Stephen Moore and businessman Herman Cain to fill two vacancies on the
Federal Reserve System’s Board of Governors – called the Federal Reserve Board for short. If confirmed, both Moore and Cain would serve for 14 years. While Trump’s other nominees to the “Fed” have been conventional conservative Republicans, Moore and especially Cain have been strongly attacked in the media and by economists and some Republicans for being completely unqualified.

Of the two, Cain has drawn the most opposition from within the Republican Party. As of this writing, his confirmation by the U.S. Senate looks unlikely. Republican Senators Mitt Romney (who ran against Obama for president in 2012), Lisa Murkowski, Cory Gardner, and Kevin Cramer have all indicated that they are leaning against voting to confirm Cain. If all them vote no, Cain’s nomination will fail unless he can win over some Democratic senators.

Cain – one of the few African-Americans Trump has nominated for high office – throughout his business career has expressed opposition to even elementary labor rights. In 2016, he briefly ran for president as a Republican on a platform of reforming the federal tax system in an extremely regressive way going beyond Trump’s own tax cut for the rich. Cain was then forced to withdraw from the presidential campaign when several women came forward alleging that he had sexually assaulted them. For Donald Trump, this was not a disqualification but it might be for some U.S. senators who have to face re-election.

Cain has not indicated that he supports inflationary monetary policies. On the contrary, he has said that he would like to see a return to the gold standard. For taking this stand, he has been ridiculed by liberals and progressives as well as mainstream economists. However, Cain does have actual central bank experience having served as head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, one of 12 regional banks that make up the Federal Reserve System.

Capitalist opponents of Cain’s nomination – Cain has been a strong supporter of Trump – fear that Cain would do Donald Trump’s bidding on the Fed’s Open Market Committee (1 ). With the 2020 presidential election approaching, it is widely suspected that Cain would push for an “easy” monetary policy and cuts to the Fed’s target for the federal funds rate in a bid to stave off the looming recession until after the November 2020 election. Not only would such a policy put the dollar-centered international monetary system in danger in the short run, it would also erode the Federal Reserve System’s independence over the long run.

Trump’s other prospective nominee, Stephen Moore, has drawn much criticism from mainstream media and professional economists but so far less from Senate Republicans. Like most of Trump’s nominees for high positions, Moore is white. He is not even a professional economist. Although majoring in economics in college, he does not hold a PhD. Unlike Cain, Moore has never directed either a business enterprise – Cain in addition to serving as head the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City was also head of the Godfather Pizza Chain. However, like Cain, Moore has been accused of mistreating women. This raises the question whether Cain’s race could be a factor in the apparent lack of opposition to Moore on the part of Senate Republicans.

Political and Economic Crises (Pt 5)

Trump’s Islamophobic demagoguery and the New Zealand massacre

On March 15, the world was shocked when a far-right gunman killed 50 Muslim worshipers and injured many others at two Mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The gunman hailed U.S. President Donald Trump as “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose,” but complained that he is not a good “policymaker and leader.”

This fascist terrorist mass murderer put his finger on the relationship between “Trumpism” and the growing fascist “white nationalist” movement, which if it should win state power in a major imperialist country would put in the shade the crimes of its 20th-century predecessor.

Trump lacks a mass movement organized not only as a political party but as a mass armed militia based on middle-class youth driven to desperation by a crisis of monopoly capitalism. Such a movement, once it reaches a certain degree of development, is capable of launching a civil war against the organized workers’ movement and its allies as well as “racial” and religious minorities of all classes. Once a fascist movement becomes powerful enough to wage a civil war, it always does so in the interest of its finance-capital masters. From the viewpoint of today’s fascists, since Trumpism is only preparing the way for the real thing, Trump falls short as a “policymaker and leader.”

But Trump is preparing the way for 21st-century fascism through his role as a “symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose,” not only in the U.S. but in all the imperialist countries. Our hearts must go out to the victims of this unspeakable crime, casualties of Trump’s racism and the capitalist system that breeds it.

We must fight Trumpism and all it stands for with all our strength. But to do this effectively, we must also fight the Party of (the current imperialist world) Order, which is doing all it can to cripple the fight against Trumpism by usurping the leadership of the “resistance” to Trump from within.

Political and Economic Crises

I had originally planned to deal with the current state of the industrial cycle in this post. I assumed I would make a few passing comments on the U.S. mid-term elections and then go into the economic analysis. However, it became clear that the political crisis gripping the U.S. has reached a new stage. At the same time, the industrial cycle that began with the Great Recession of 2007-09 has now entered its terminal stage.

I have therefore decided to begin with the political crisis this month and, events allowing, examine the terminal stage of the current industrial cycle next month. One way or another, the interaction between the political crisis represented by Trump’s rise to power and the developing cyclical economic crisis will dominate national and global politics between now and the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

This blog has centered on capitalist economic crises, especially the periodic crises of overproduction. The industrial cycle with its periodic crises of overproduction and the political crises and wars that can turn into revolutions – or counterrevolutions – are closely intertwined in ways that are not always obvious.

The Current U.S. Economic Boom in Historical Perspective (Pt 2)

Trump’s attempts to reverse the decline of U.S. capitalism

In April 2018, the U.S. political world was shaken by the news that Paul Ryan, the Ayn Rand/Austrian school-inspired Republican speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, would not be running for re-election in this year’s mid-term race. Ryan claimed he was retiring at the age of 48 from politics “to spend more time with my family.”

It is widely believed, however, that Ryan is retiring from Congress because he fears a humiliating defeat at the hands of his Democratic Party opponent, the construction worker, trade unionist, and “Berniecrat” Randy Bryce. Over the last year, many of Ryan’s constituents were no doubt shocked to learn that their handsome, genial congressperson wanted to take away their health insurance.

It seems likely that Ryan, who is believed to harbor presidential ambitions, plans to lie low, make lots of money in the private sector, and count on the public forgetting (with the assistance of the mass media) about his attempt to throw tens of millions of people off their health insurance. At a later day, Ryan will be poised to reenter electoral politics and ride a new Republican wave, perhaps all the way to the White House.

But how could there be another Republican wave in the aftermath of the ever-growing debacle of the Trump presidency and the self-exposure of the Republican Party on the health insurance issue? To assume that a Republican comeback is impossible, would be to ignore the lessons of the last great “progressive” victory in U.S. politics—the election in November 2008 that brought into the White House the first African-American president, combined with solid Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. However, at the end of Obama’s triumph lurked the racist Donald Trump, backed by Republican majorities in both the Senate and the House.

Prospects for the Economy Under Trump

This article will come in two parts. This month, I examine policies of the Federal Reserve and Trump’s domestic policies. Next month, I will end this series with an examination of Trump’s global economic policies.

The Federal Reserve and Donald Trump

On December 14, 2016, the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee announced that it had finally decided to raise the federal funds rate—the rate that commercial banks, not the Fed itself, charge each other for overnight loans—by a quarter of one percent. Instead of targeting a rate of 0.25 to 0.50 percent like it did between December 2015 and December 2016, its new target is 0.50 to 0.75 percent.

Since Trump’s victory on November 8, long-term interest rates have risen sharply. This combined with the decision of the Fed to finally nudge up the fed funds rate indicates that the money market has tightened since Trump’s election. In the course of the industrial cycle, once the money market starts to tighten it is only a matter of time before recession arrives. The recession marks the end of one industrial cycle and the beginning of the next.

As it became increasingly likely that Trump could actually win the Republican nomination, the Fed put on hold its earlier plans to raise the fed funds rate multiple times in the course of 2016. The normal practice is for the Federal Reserve System to raise the fed funds rate repeatedly in the later stages of the industrial cycle. Indeed, this is central banking 101. These policies are designed to hold in check credit-fueled “over-trading” (overproduction), as well as stock market, land and primary-commodity speculation that can end in a crash with nasty consequences.

If the central bank resists raising interest rates too long by flooding the banking system with newly created currency, this leads sooner or later to a run on the currency, which is what happened in the 1970s. The result back then was stagflation and deep recessions with interest rates eventually rising into the double digits, which effectively wiped out the profit of enterprise—defined as the difference between the total profit and the rate of interest. At the end of the stagflation in the early 1980s came the explosion of credit, sometimes called “financialization,” the aftereffects of which are still with us today.

Under the present dollar-centered international monetary system, the repeated failure of the Federal Reserve System to push up interest rates would lead to the collapse of the U.S. dollar and the dollar system. The inevitable result would be a financial crash and thus the military and political crash of the U.S. world empire, which has held the capitalist world together since 1945.

In this cycle, however, the Federal Reserve waited more than eight years after the outbreak of the crisis in August 2007 before it began to push up the federal funds rate. The reason for the prolonged delay is that the current U.S. economic expansion, which began in 2009—representing the rising phase of the current industrial cycle—has been the slowest on record.

During this extraordinarily feeble expansion, the U.S. GDP has grown, with some fluctuations, at a rate of only about 2 percent a year. This performance contrasts sharply with the double-digit U.S. GDP rates of growth that occurred during the expansion of 1933-1937 and again after the severe but brief recession of 1937-1938 during the Great Depression. Far more than in the 1930s, the current era has been marked by “secular stagnation” in the U.S. as well as Europe and Japan.

Beginning with the panic that broke out with the failure of the giant Lehman Brothers investment bank in September 2008, the Federal Reserve engineered an explosion in the dollar-denominated monetary base designed to stave off a new super-crisis that could have been much worse than the one in 1929-1933. This effort succeeded in preventing the crisis from reaching the extremes the earlier super-crisis did in most countries—but not all. For example, the crisis/depression that began in the U.S. in 2007 has been far worse in Greece than the crisis of the 1930s was in that country. But even in countries where a full-scale repeat of the 1930s Depression was avoided, the post-crisis stagnation has been far more stubborn than anything seen in the 1930s.

Donald Trump, the New Political Chief of Capitalist Society

Donald J. Trump, the 70-year-old New York billionaire, real-estate magnate, owner of casinos and golf courses, and former clownish reality star, is the new political chief of the United States and leader of the “free world” (as the U.S. world empire likes to call itself).

Trump was actually defeated by a margin of 2.3 million votes in the election by Hillary Clinton. However, he won an overwhelming victory in the electoral college. The electoral college is itself an undemocratic hangover from when the plantation economy dependent on the slave labor of kidnapped Africans and their descendants dominated the southern U.S. This would be as though the Labour Party in Britain won a small but definite majority in the House of Commons but the House of Lords and the Crown—both survivors of the time when a feudal economy dominated what is now Great Britain—combined to install a prime minister from the Tory Party.

Hail to the Chief!

The big capitalists know full well that, whether or not they like a particular “leader of the free world,” they have only one such leader at a time. Immediately after the proclamation of Trump as “president-elect,” outgoing President Barack Obama wished Trump success. He explained that, whatever differences there might be between the first African American to be elected to the presidency and his right-wing racist successor, “we”—the ruling capitalist class—are “playing on the same team.”

Obama is correct. Hillary Clinton after a lag of a few hours—reports said that she had not even considered the possibility that she would lose and had not prepared a concession speech—delivered a meek statement along the same lines.

Ironically, Trump had declared in the weeks leading up to the election that “the system is rigged” and he might not accept the results. This indicated that Trump himself did not actually expect to win. Whether Trump would have recognized a Clinton victory as legitimate and indicated his support of a President Hillary Clinton will never be known.

The selection of Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama for U.S. attorney-general indicates that the Trump administration will be the most racist administration since at least the days of Woodrow Wilson. Ronald Reagan nominated Sessions for a federal judgeship, but his racism was too obvious and he was rejected by the Senate. Sessions called African American employees of the Justice Department “boy”—the term of address used by white slaveholders when addressing their African male slaves. Later, in the Jim Crow era, white bosses, officialdom and racist whites would address African American men as “boy.”

Sessions once joked that he had no arguments with the Ku Klux Klan until he found out that Klan members used marijuana. The point of this joke is that Sessions, though he disapproves of weed, has no disagreements with the Klan on the question of race. This joke is beyond offensive and in a decent society would disqualify him for any public office, let alone the position as chief law-enforcement officer. The Sessions nomination gives the lie to any claim that the president-elect is not a racist.

Trump appointed Steve Bannon as White House chief advisor and strategist. Bannon, the former chief executive officer of Breitbart “News,” a far-right website that has provided a platform for the neo-Nazi-ridden alt-right movement, has sent chills down the spines of all American who do not fit the white-nationalist definition of European Americans. As defined by neo-Nazis—or white nationalists, as they like to call themselves today—non-European Americans include the African American community; Latinos, especially but not only the Mexican community; Native Americans; the entire Muslim community and, yes, that other group not considered to be European American, the Jewish community.

Not so long ago, the complacent mainstream leaders of the U.S. Jewish community, who are all Zionists, claimed that anti-Semitism today came from the left. According to these misleaders, anti-Semitism showed itself in the form of the Boycott and Divestment and Black Lives Matter movements because the leaders of these movements expressed solidarity with the struggle of the Palestinian people against Israeli apartheid.

But then a funny thing happened. The old anti-Semitism of “the right”—that is, the real thing—is now raising its ugly head not only in far-off Poland, Hungary and Hitler’s homeland of Austria but right here in the U.S. Recently, the Anti-Defamation League denounced the attacks on Muslims. This is a welcome development though it would be nice if they extended their defense of Muslims to Arab Muslims who are native to Palestine. This illustrates the fact that the state of Israel and the entire Zionist movement are actually barriers in the struggle against fascism and the real anti-Semitism that inevitably accompanies it.

The U.S. Two-Party System After Trump

For reasons I explained in an earlier post, the bipartisan Democratic-Republican leadership of the U.S. ruling class finds the prospect of Donald Trump as U.S. president unacceptable. When the conventions were held in July, polls showed a Trump victory was not out of the question. Indeed, for a brief time in July, after the Republican convention but before the Democratic convention, Trump had a modest lead in the polls against Hillary Clinton.

The media, including media that normally support the Republican Party, then launched a campaign of ridicule against Trump. Trump has even been pictured as an agent of Russian President Vladimir Putin. In the wake of this media campaign, Trump plunged in the polls. Most recent polls show Trump rebounding but still trailing Clinton and some show Trump closing the gap.

In the course of his campaign, Trump has managed to insult or otherwise alienate huge sections of the U.S. voting population. These include African-Americans; Latinos; Muslims of all nationalities, or people who “look” Muslim; Native Americans; anybody else who doesn’t look “white”; and Jews. Trump is also extremely unpopular among many female voters, who represent around half the vote. Polls show that among African-Americans Trump has the support of maybe 1 percent, at most 2 percent, of the African-American population. This is an all-time low for any Democratic or Republican presidential candidate. There was a time when the “Party of Lincoln” got the majority of the African-American vote. In recent years, however, only 4 to 6 percent of African-Americans have voted Republican. Trump has managed to whittle this down further.

Trump is extremely unpopular among younger voters, or “millennials” as they have been dubbed. Never since modern polling began has a candidate of either the Democratic or Republican party polled so poorly among young people of all “races” and genders—who represent the future. This is in contrast to Adolf Hitler during his rise to power, who was particularly popular among the non-working class German youth. The Nazis captured the campuses even before they captured the streets and then the government.

If Hitler had alienated as much of the German population as Trump has managed to do, nobody would recognize his name today. Due to the U.S. empire’s advanced and growing state of decay, fascism remains a growing long-term threat. The Trump campaign has given a boost to those in the U.S. who are trying to build a genuine fascist movement. This development should not be taken lightly. However, the victory of fascism in the world’s dominant imperialist country is not imminent. If fascism some day comes to power in the U.S., it is hardly likely that now 70-year-old Trump will be its leader.

Though a Trump victory in November cannot be excluded at this time, it is likely that the world will have to deal with an extremely hawkish Hillary Clinton, who by all indications favors a more aggressive Bush-like foreign policy than that associated with President Obama.

Not that Obama’s foreign policy has been exactly “peaceful.” However, Obama has tried to avoid large-scale combat on the ground, limiting himself to using “special forces” numbered in the dozens or hundreds. Instead, he has made heavy use of drones combined with conventional bombers in Libya, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and other war theaters. The administration, fearing revived anti-war demonstrations in the streets, has done everything it can to fight its wars with minimal casualties
among U.S. forces.

It should be noted, however, that Obama did not keep his promise to end the war in Afghanistan. After a hundred thousand troops deployed to this war front failed to crush the Afghan resistance forces, Obama agreed to keep a U.S. ground force of around 10,000, combined with bombing using both drones and conventional bombers. This campaign is now set to continue indefinitely.

While Obama rejected the bombing of Syrian government forces, he later opened a bombing campaign in Syria against the Islamic State. The administration has now sent special forces into northern Syria to help Kurdish rebels trying to establish a Kurdish state in opposition to the Syrian government of President Assad—bringing the U.S. closer to open warfare with that government.

Under the more hawkish Hillary Clinton, chances of the commitment of large-scale ground combat forces in the Middle East, Africa or even Ukraine or other areas near Russia will, all else remaining equal, increase. And the increased warfare that Hillary Clinton is indicating she will bring can only, in the long run, strengthen the fascist forces that have been rallying around the Trump campaign in this electoral cycle. A Hillary Clinton victory in November will therefore in no way be a victory in the struggle against the growing danger of U.S. fascism.\

Some Observations on the Democratic and Republican Conventions

These observations are not meant to be exhaustive. To write an exhaustive analysis of the just-held conventions of the two ruling parties of U.S. capitalism would take up far too much space and take us too far afield from the main subject of the blog, the theory of capitalist crises. In this post, however, I will make some observations on how the economic decline of U.S. capitalism was reflected in the recently held conventions and provide some historical perspective.

Donald Trump becomes official GOP nominee

There were last-ditch attempts by anti-Trump neo-liberal right-wingers to deny Trump the nomination by freeing up the Republican delegates so they could “vote their conscience” and nominate a more acceptable—to Wall Street—Republican. Among those widely mentioned as alternatives were the union-busting Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and Tea Party supporter Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. But pro-Trump forces handily defeated the “anybody but Trump” movement at the convention, and the New York billionaire racist and reality TV star was duly nominated to run for president of the United States.

Trump chose as his running mate Indiana Governor and Tea Party darling John Pence. This was seen as a gesture to the more traditional neo-liberal right wing of the party. The Tea Party faction strongly supports neo-liberal economics and is thus far more acceptable to Wall Street than is Trump with his pseudo-populist and protectionist demagoguery. The high point—if it can be called that—of the Republican convention was when Senator Ted Cruz addressed the convention delegates but failed to endorse Trump. When it became clear that Cruz was not going to endorse Trump, he was loudly booed.

Media polls taken after the Republican convention showed Trump for the first time with a modest but very real lead over Hillary Clinton. Though it is normal for the Republican and Democratic candidates to have a lead right after their respective conventions, Trump has been increasingly ridiculed in the media ever since it became likely that he would be the Republican nominee. After the Democratic convention, new polls showed Clinton had regained the lead, which indeed is in line with the normal pattern. But Clinton’s lead is not a commanding one, despite the non-stop and escalating anti-Trump propaganda campaign in the media.

One of the reasons Trump is doing as well as he is, despite the opposition of the traditional media, is his use of social media, especially Twitter. The polls show that a Trump upset victory is not yet beyond the range of possibility in November, especially if new scandals hit Hillary Clinton or there is a surprise financial crisis and recession.

As a result, the media campaign against Trump escalated, with articles appearing that suggest that Trump may actually be clinically insane. This goes far beyond the normal mudslinging that occurs during U.S. presidential elections. The Washington Post, one of the leading organs of U.S. imperialism, even ran a special editorial declaring that Trump is a threat to the republic and completely unacceptable as U.S. president.

Cruz is not the only leading Republican to refuse to endorse Trump. A significant section of the Republican leadership has as well, including both George Bush senior and junior. The failure of two ex-President Bushes to endorse Trump, considering the realities of the U.S. two-party system, is in effect a backhanded endorsement of his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. The Koch brothers’ family of industrial capitalists, staunch Republicans with extreme right-wing neo-liberal views, have also refused to endorse Trump. This also amounts to a backhanded endorsement of Clinton.

The former billionaire Republican Mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg, who owns Bloomberg News, which covers the stock market and other financial markets, has not only endorsed Hillary Clinton but went so far as to speak at the Democratic convention. Even the ghosts of ultra-right Senator Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan were summoned up from the nether world to denounce Trump. Both Goldwater’s widow and Ronald Reagan’s son claimed that neither Goldwater nor Reagan would have supported Trump if they were alive.

The Democratic convention that officially nominated Hillary Clinton was held appropriately in a hall named after the giant Wells Fargo Bank, one of the most powerful banks in the U.S. Considering the large numbers of Republicans who are either openly endorsing her or giving her bi-partisan support if she wins in November, Clinton will not only be the first female president—itself a sign of social progress—but the most “bipartisan president” since George Washington.

It was also revealed just before the convention that William Kristol and George Wills, major Republican intellectuals, have dropped their registration in the Republican Party and have re-registered “independent.” This indicates that these major figures, not themselves “electoral politicians” but rather “opinion makers” and right-wing political thinkers for the U.S. ruling class, foresee a major reshuffling of the two-party system in the very near future. They are keeping their options open on which party they will identify with in coming years. Will they return to a “post-Trump” Republican Party, become supporters of the Democratic Party, or participate in creating a new right-wing party based on the neo-liberal” principles so dear to them?