The Current Industrial Cycle (Pt 3)

A deepening political crisis

On Aug. 23, African-American Jacob Blake was shot in the back by police seven times in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Blake is expected to survive but is paralyzed from the waist down. This latest police outrage triggered a wave of demonstrations by the Black Lives Matter movement in Kenosha and elsewhere. Two days later, a Trump supporter and police wannabe named Kyle Rittenhouse shot to death two Black Lives Matter protesters with a rifle he was carrying. Rittenhouse, who lives in Illinois, is a member of a fascist militia group that came to Kenosha for the announced purpose of defending the property of business owners from Black Lives Matter protesters.

The cops were seen thanking the fascists and offering them water. After Rittenhouse killed the two protesters, he walked up to the cops with his hands up. However, the guardians of “law and order” refused to arrest him. He was finally arrested and charged with murder only after he returned to Illinois. U.S. President Donald Trump then weighed in. Trump defended the young fascist killer claiming that Rittenhouse faced certain death if he had not acted to defend himself. Trump also attacked the alleged violence of “left-wing” — Black Lives Matter — protesters but defended the violence of Rittenhouse and other murderous right-wing counter-protesters.

The Crisis (Pt 9)

After police murder of George Floyd, demonstrations and uprisings sweep U.S.

On June 1, a combined force of military police, park police, and Secret Service brutally cleared an area around the White House of peaceful demonstrators who had been protesting the May 25 murder by Minneapolis police officers of African-American George Floyd. To clear the crowd, these military-police forces used a low-flying helicopter, tear gas, and stun grenades. This was so that President Donald Trump could appear in front of a nearby church Bible in hand.

Trump, who had earlier been sheltering in a special bunker beneath the White House, threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807, which would permit him to order the military to suppress the massive wave of demonstrations and uprisings that have been sweeping the U.S. since the police murder of Floyd. Trump’s threat to use the military, if carried out, would be a major step towards a military-Bonapartist dictatorship.

Trump’s threats led to a wave of complaints by mostly Democratic politicians and warnings of some retired generals, including Trump’s former Secretary of “Defense” General James “Maddog” Mattis, not to use the military against peaceful demonstrators. Republican leaders, with a few exceptions, either supported Trump or maintained an icy silence.

The Crisis (Pt 6)

U.S. unemployment hits Depression levels

In April, the U.S. Labor Department U-3 measure of unemployment hit 14.7 percent. The U-3 rate had been used over the last year or so to claim that unemployment was the lowest since 1969. In fact, it is designed to greatly underestimate the real level of unemployment. Even some Federal Reserve Board officials admit that the real rate of unemployment is over 20 percent and fast approaching the all-time quasi-official estimate of 24.9 percent that occurred at the very bottom of the Depression in March 1933. Nobody denies that the number of unemployed in the U.S. is in the tens of millions — around 50 million if you believe AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka.

However, it is claimed by Trump and most economists that the current unemployment crisis is the result of the deliberate shutting down of the economy made necessary by the COVID-19 pandemic. What is occurring, according to this logic, is not the long-feared Depression II but the “Great Suppression.” Though unemployment generally declined after March 1933 — except for the sharp but short-lived Roosevelt recession of 1937-38 — “full employment” did not return until the U.S. had entered World War II in 1941. This time, it is claimed by Trump and many economists, in contrast to 1933 there is no underlying economic crisis. Therefore, “full employment” will return much more quickly. The pandemic will have run its course within months, as Trump claims, or at most within several years, as claimed by more cautious economists.

Therefore, the argument goes, while still a terrible situation it is not quite Depression II. Though unemployment may be as bad as during the Depression, it won’t last nearly as long. Anyway, Depression-level unemployment is the necessary price we have to pay to stave off the much greater evil of millions of deaths in the U.S. alone from COVID-19. Not surprisingly, Donald Trump, who had been planning on running on “prosperity and full employment” as shown by the Labor Department’s U-3 unemployment rate, is leading the charge to “open America for business.”

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.

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.

World War I—Its Causes and Consequences (pt 2)

Wars rarely turn out the way their initiators expect. In our own time, we can point to many examples. George W. Bush and Tony Blair, when they ordered the invasion of Iraq on March 19, 2003, believed that the U.S.-British forces would defeat Iraq’s armed forces—weakened by years of sanctions, continued military attacks, and forced unilateral disarmament—within weeks with hardly any casualties on the side of the invaders. It would then be “mission accomplished.”

But now in August 2014—100 years to the month since the outbreak of the “Great War”—the U.S. has resumed bombing Iraq as the government it created crumbles. The reason this government is failing is that virtually no Iraqi wants to fight and die for it. Why should an Iraqi fight for a foreign-imposed government?

Nor should we forget the war against Afghanistan launched by the Washington war-makers in October 2001 against the Taliban government, which had no modern armed forces, only a militia. Within weeks, U.S. media were writing about that most unequal war in the past tense. But now, 13 years later, the U.S. is still struggling to find a way to exit that war without the return of the Taliban to power. That war didn’t turn out as the Washington war-makers expected either.

Nor has the air war fought by U.S-NATO against Libya in 2011 turned out the way the Obama administration, which launched that war, expected. And the same will probably be true of the most recent war—if it can even be called a war—launched by Israel, with at least the tacit support of the U.S., against the people of tiny Gaza, which has no army, air force or navy.

This August marks not only the 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War I but also the 50th anniversary of the infamous Gulf of Tonkin Incident. If we were to believe the U.S. propaganda of the time, (North) Vietnam’s tiny navy attacked without any provocation the mightiest navy the world had ever seen! This “incident” occurred—or rather didn’t occur—on August 2, 1964, just two days short of the 50th anniversary of the start of the “Great War.”

The U.S. Congress used this faked incident to grant the Johnson administration cart blanche to wage war against Vietnam, which the administration took full advantage of by launching a series of bombing raids on the Democratic Republic of Vietnam that August. This gave way to a steady air bombardment of (North) Vietnam—the South had been subject to steady U.S. bombardment for the preceding five years—the following year after Johnson won re-election as the “peace candidate.”

While the Washington war-makers succeeded in killing millions of Vietnamese people and doing incalculable damage to the environment with Agent Orange and other forms of environmental warfare, in the end the war against Vietnam did not turn out the way the war-makers in the White House, the Pentagon and Congress expected. For example, the renaming of Saigon Ho Chi Minh City was probably not part of Washington’s war plans.

Nor did the war against Korea, which is usually seen as beginning in June 1950 but really began when Washington occupied the southern part of Korea in 1945, turn out exactly as the Washington war-makers intended, though they succeeded in killing millions of Korean people and left no multistory building standing in the northern part of the country.

The rule that wars seldom turn out the way those who start them expect was certainly true of the general European war that began exactly a century ago. To the generation that actually fought, it was known as the “Great War” or “the World War,” ”the war to make the world safe for democracy,” or, most ironic of all, “the war to end all wars.” But as a result of unintended consequences of the war, it had to undergo a name change. It was renamed World War I, a mere prelude to the even greater bloodbath of World War II.

‘Before the leaves fall’

When the general European war commenced on August 4, 1914, each warring imperialist power was convinced that it would be a short war and that it would emerge victorious. Or as was said, the war would be over “before the leaves fall.”

Change of Guard at the Fed, the Specter of ‘Secular Stagnation,’ and Some Questions of Monetary Theory

Ben Bernanke will not seek a third term as chairperson of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors – “the Fed.” President Obama has nominated, and the U.S. Senate is expected to formally approve, economist Janet Yellen as his successor. The Federal Reserve Board is a government body that controls the operation of the U.S Federal Reserve System.

“The Fed” lies at the heart of the U.S. central banking system, which under the dollar standard is in effect the central bank of the entire world.

A professional central banker

Janet Yellen is currently vice-chairperson of the Federal Reserve Board. She has also served as an economics professor at the University of California at Berkeley and chaired President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic advisers. She headed the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco from 2004 to 2010, one of the 12 Federal Reserve Banks within the Federal Reserve System. If there is such a thing as a professional central banker, Yellen is it.

Yellen will be the first woman to serve as head of the Federal Reserve Board and will hold the most powerful position within the U.S. government ever held by a woman. Yellen’s appointment therefore reflects gains for women’s equality that have been made since the modern women’s liberation movement began around 1969.

Like other social movements that emerged out of the 1960s radicalization, the modern women’s liberation movement began on the radical left. The very name of the movement was inspired by the name of the main resistance organization fighting U.S. imperialism in Vietnam – the National Liberation Front. However, as a veteran bourgeois economist and a long-time major policymaker in the U.S. government, Yellen would not be expected to have much sympathy for the 20th-century revolutions and movements that made her appointment even a remote possibility.

Significantly, Yellen was appointed only after Lawrence Summers, considered like Yellen a major (bourgeois) economist and said to be the favorite of the Obama administration to succeed Bernanke, announced his withdrawal from contention. Summers became notorious when as president of Harvard University he expressed the opinion that women are not well represented in engineering and the sciences because of mental limitations rooted in biology.

Summers was obliged to resign as president of Harvard, and his anti-woman remarks undoubtedly played a role in his failure to win enough support to be appointed Fed chairman. In addition, Summers attacked the African American Professor Cornell West for his work on Black culture and his alleged “grade inflation,” causing West to leave Harvard. This hardly made Summers popular in the African American community. His nomination would therefore have produced serious strains in the Democratic Coalition, so Summers was obliged to withdraw.

Ben Bernanke like Yellen is considered a distinguished (bourgeois) economist. He had devoted his professional life to exploring the causes of the Great Depression, much like Yellen has. Essentially, Bernanke attempted to prove that the Depression was caused by faulty policies of the Federal Reserve System and the government, and not by contradictions inherent in capitalist production – such as, for example, periodic crises of overproduction. Bernanke denied that overproduction was the cause of the Depression.

Like Milton Friedman, Bernanke blamed the Depression on the failure of the Federal Reserve System to prevent a contraction of money and credit. Bernanke put the emphasis on credit, while Friedman put the emphasis on the money supply. Blaming crises on currency and credit, according to Marx, is the most shallow and superficial crisis theory of all.

Monetary crisis in Cyprus and the ghost of 1931

In recent weeks, a financial, banking-monetary and political crisis erupted on the small Mediterranean island country of Cyprus. Here I am interested in examining only one aspect of this complex crisis, the banking and monetary aspect.

The Cyprus banking crisis was largely caused by the fact that Cypriot banks invested heavily in Greek government bonds. Government bonds appeared to be a safe investment in a period of crisis-depression. But then these bonds fell sharply in value due to Greece’s partial default in 2012—the so-called “haircut” that the holders of Greek government bonds were forced to take in order to avoid a full-scale default. The Cyprus banking and financial crisis is therefore an extension of the Greek crisis. However, in Cyprus the banking crisis went one stage beyond what has occurred so far in either the U.S. or Europe.

The European Union, the European Central Bank and the IMF imposed an agreement on Cyprus that involved massive losses for the owners of large bank deposits, over 100,000 euros. Mass protests by workers in Cyprus forced the European Union and the European Central Bank to retreat from their original plans to have small depositors take losses as well.

Since the late 19th century, central banks, like the Bank of England, have gone out of their way when they wind up the affairs of failing banks to do so in ways that preserve the currency value of bank deposits for their owners. The officials charged with regulating the banks prefer instead to wipe out the stockholders and sometimes the bondholders.

Why are the central banks and other governmental regulatory organs—like the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Agency, which was created under the New Deal in hopes of avoiding bank runs in the United States—so eager to preserve the value of bank deposits, even at the expense of bank stockholders and bondholders?

The reason is that if the owners of deposits fear that they could lose their money, they will attempt to convert their deposits into hard cash all at once, causing a run on the banks. Under the present monetary system, “hard cash” is state-created legal-tender token money. Whenever depositors of a bank en mass attempt to convert their bank deposits into cash, the reserves of the banks are drained. Unless the “run” is quickly halted, the bank fails.

A bank facing a run in a last-ditch attempt to avoid failure calls in all loans it possibly can, sells off its assets such as government bonds in order to raise cash to meet its depositors’ demands, and halts additional loans to preserve cash. Therefore, if there is a general run on the banks, the result is a drying up of loan money capital, creating a massive contraction in demand. This causes commodities to pile up unsold in warehouses, which results in a sharp contraction of production and employment. Soaring unemployment can then lead to a severe social crisis.

This is exactly the situation that now confronts the people of Cyprus. University of Cyprus political scientist Antonis Ellinas, according to Menelaos Hadjicostis of CNBC and AP, “predicted that unemployment, currently at 15 percent, will ‘probably go through the roof’ over the next few years.” With official unemployment in Cyprus already at a Depression-level 15 percent, what will the unemployment rate be “when it goes through the roof”? Throughout the Eurozone as a whole, official unemployment now stands at 12 percent.

Economic Stagnation, Mass Unemployment, Budget Deficits and the Industrial Cycle

A few months ago I had dinner with a some friends from the old days. One of them expressed the view that the current economic situation of prolonged economic stagnation, continuing mass unemployment, and falling real wages represented a fundamental change in the workings of the capitalist system. He asked what is behind this change? This a good question and is worth examining in a non-trivial way.

A month or so ago the media, which had been painting a picture of a steadily improving economy, was startled when the U.S. government announced that its first estimate showed that the fourth-quarter GDP declined at an annual rate of .01 percent. Though slight, this would be a decline nonetheless.

Those economists who make a business of guessing the U.S. government’s GDP estimate expected an annualized rate of growth of 1.5 percent for the fourth quarter (of 2012). This would represent a historically low rate of growth, but growth nonetheless.

The media has been working hard to create an impression of a recovery that is at last gaining momentum. Therefore, if we are to believe the capitalist press, a “new era” of lasting prosperity is on the way. This latest “new era” will be fully assured if only the Obama administration and both Democrats and Republicans can settle their differences on the need to bring the current deficit in the finances of the U.S. federal government under control.

This is to be done by some combination of “entitlement cuts” for the working and middle classes and very modest tax increases for the rich. With the tax question settled by the New Year’s Day agreement, the only question now is how deep the entitlement cuts will be, spending on the military and “national security” being largely untouchable.

Thrown somewhat off balance by the estimated fourth-quarter GDP decline, the economists, bourgeois journalists and Wall Street brokerage houses—ever eager to paint the U.S. economy in glowing terms in order to sell stocks to middle-class savers—explained that “special factors” were behind the slight fall in the estimated GDP, not a new recession.