STRIKE

STRIKE 

 

US consumer prices were resurgent last month, dashing hopes of a nascent slowdown and likely assuring another historically large interest-rate hike from the Federal Reserve.  From a year earlier, prices climbed 8.3%, a slight deceleration, largely due to recent declines in gasoline prices. Shelter, food and medical care were among the largest contributors to price growth.

 

-       US Inflation Tops Forecasts, Cementing Odds of Big Fed Hike, Bloomberg

 

For an administration touting itself as the most pro-union in history, negotiating a deal with no paid sick time (and allowing workers to still be disciplined if they are sick four of the seven days in a week), with a pharmaceutical deal with no limits on costs to the workers, with health insurance demanding absurdly high premiums (slightly improved, but likely paired with increases in health care costs) is not even close to enough. Nor is it what we should expect from the leadership in national unions who could use the real power of their members to make industry and government understand the importance of their working lives.

 

-       Rail Workers, Nurses, Teachers Are Fighting From the Bottom Up, The Nation

 

By Gregg Wall (9-17-2022)

 

Another week goes by and somehow the American experiment –- despite the most disgusting & repugnant efforts of our economic & political leadership -– survives and staggers forward, propelled onward on the backs of tens of millions of hard-working, honest Americans.  Roughly sixty to seventy percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck.  Thirty-three percent of Americans don’t make a living wage and the minimum wage remains a hideous joke, at $7.25 an hour.  As told by Senator Sanders, while standing up for workers on the floor of the Senate this week, seventy million Americans are either underinsured or uninsured for health care, and America still doesn’t have mandatory paid family and medical leave. 

 

It might be one thing if the United States was in sync with other nations.  But no, billionaires and bought off, day trading political leadership stand alone … head and shoulders above all other leading nations… in how gratuitously evil America treats its labor force.  And then, corporations and multinationals have the unmitigated gall to whine how they can’t find workers anymore.  Perhaps, that’s because America’ for-profit health care system – and parsimonious employers – killed off, or waylaid, hundreds of thousands of workers during the pandemic?   You know, the pandemic that is alive and well and with Fall just around the corner.

 

Meanwhile, America has not seen wage & wealth inequality on this scale since the last Gilded Age.   With Business Insider reporting that CEOs make 670X the lowest paid workers.   And we heard this week, from railroad management, that they… and they alone… are responsible for the unseemly profits made last year (some $20 billion in 2021).  To say Americans are ‘living to work’ no longer applies.  Instead, Americans are literally working to fight off death, homelessness, humility, and starvation.  As the diseased minds of robber barons grow more contaminated and polluted, the more rigged the system becomes … their minds crippled & infected by that greatest of mental & social disease: greed.  As if crushing consumers, destroying democracy, harming labor and small business owners is something to be proud of.  

 

Take a good look America.  Examine closely our boardrooms and C-suites, take a close look at McKinsey and other consulting firms.  Because it is here – amidst the ever-growing ranks of billionaires, and especially, including the billionaires – that you will find the lowest form of humanity the world has ever witnessed.  Perhaps rivalling the U.S. congress, itself, in its greed and mendacity. 

 

It's with this as a backdrop, I would recommend to American workers … nurses, doctors, railroad workers, teachers, auto workers, delivery drivers…  the indispensable, and yet, the entirely disenfranchised … STRIKE.  Bring the powerful to their knees, let them flounder in the mercilessness of the system they created and that has brought them untold wealth.  STRIKE, rip off the band-aid, and expose the septic shock that is the American -neoliberal- economy, as it lies flatlining on the operating table.  

 

It’s the only thing the oligarchy answers to… the loss of profits.  More precious than their own children: capital gains and greed. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Switching gears, inflation – what in reality is all too often consumer price gouging – continues to soar.  As reported this week, year over year, price gouging is up 8.3%.  And the war Biden and Larry Summers are waging against American workers continues unabated.  Instead of attacking billionaires and multinational donors for gouging consumers, workers, children & moms… the supply side of the equation…. Team Failure, at the White House, continues to wage economic warfare against the American people with a higher interest rate regime and endless austerity (anyone see where BBB went to?).  In essence, economic trench warfare against the demand side of the ledger, the American people.  And you thought the fascist GOP were ruthless? 

 

The problem with cutting the legs out from under the consumers & labor, aside from the obvious, is that it leaves all those billionaires, cartels, monopolies, and Wall St commodities speculators unhindered and unimpeded to gouge and gouge some more.  Recession is no longer in doubt anymore and all hopes of a so-called soft landing are all but dead and buried. 

 

Big Oil, food monopolies, for-profit health care, and rents are exacting a very heavy toll upon the American people… and our, allegedly, pro-labor President, the US congress, and the two-party system, along with the oligarchy they all report into, are entirely responsible.  Relying upon the Federal Reserve to bailout America, and the congress, out of self-inflicted crisis after self-inflicted crisis – by printing trillions and trillions of dollars – has brought us to this place.  And given thirty trillion plus in national debt, eleven to twelve trillion in corporate debt, and everyday Americans maxing out their plastic to stay alive… it’s doubtful that the Federal Reserve is going to be able to reverse the concentration of economic power its printing presses have wrought.  Meanwhile, as tweeted by Bob Burgess over at Bloomberg, the debt service load on the national debt is climbing higher and higher… as the FED jacks ups rates to fight consumer price gouging.   Roughly $700 billion in interest expense… and if rates climb higher and higher, one trillion in annual interest expense is not out of the question. 

 

Relying upon the kindness of billionaires, monopolists, and the FED isn't going to get the job done.  Higher wages won't tame inflation, if utilities are just going to pass the cost along to the consumer, while keeping profit margins catastrophic.  At some point, if America is to survive as some semblance of a democracy, the congress is going to have to actually earn its pay, do its job…  and enforce antitrust, begin intervening in commodities markets, regulating utilities & monopolies, and tax extraordinary wealth (and much of that begins by funding regulatory agencies with a vengeance & jamming the revolving door).  At least in the same measure and with the same brio… that billionaires and robber barons attack Americans, democracy, and freedom 24/7/365. 

 

 

Copyright JM Hamilton Publishing 2022