Finance and the Economy

Argentinian Unions Mobilize Against Runaway Inflation

August 22, 2022 Kawsachun News. Resist! Argentina, Finance and the Economy, Inflation, Mass Action

August 18 - Argentinian unions and social movements are marching today towards the National Congress to protest against runaway inflation and ‘speculators’. The march has been organized by the two largest union confederations; CGT and CTA. Their joint statement said; “Our country demands firm commitments to mitigate the social injustice that is suffocating us today (..) political actors must abandon petty electoral confrontation for the benefit of individual interests. Inflation has reached intolerable levels and is pulverizing the purchasing power of workers.” Sergio Palazzo, lawmaker for the ruling Frente de Todos (Front for All’) has backed the march and stated that “the intolerable action of the financial corporations have threatened the food rights of millions of Argentinians as well as the process of reactivating the productive economy”.

Independent Unions Can Help Break Through The Economic Crisis

August 22, 2022 Shaun Richman, Jacobin. Organize! Class Struggle, Finance and the Economy, History, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

In a period of extreme social and economic crises, when the major labor unions have reduced their organizing programs to a fraction of what they once were and the courts stand athwart any effort to protect workers’ interests, scrappy new independent unions raise hope against hope that maybe — just maybe — workers can fight back and win. I’m writing, of course, about the early 1930s. A newly published book finds some surprising parallels between that era and our own. An eleventh volume in the prolific Marxist labor historian Philip S. Foner’s History Of The Labor Movement In The United States has just been published, after it was discovered that Foner had completed the manuscript before he died in 1994. Subtitled The Great Depression 1929–1932, the book covers a period in which the established unions of the American Federation of Labor were not conducting many organizing campaigns or strikes and had little idea how to successfully contest for power in the large mass production industries that played a dominant role in American life.

How Free Stores Fight Waste, Connect Communities And Foster Resilience

August 21, 2022 Joanna Haugen, Resilience. Create! Community, Finance and the Economy, Free Stores, Poverty

For many people, the daily reality is dire: As of May 2022, 58 percent of Americans (approximately 150 million adults) are living paycheck to paycheck. Inflation recently hit a 40-year high, with prices for food, rent, energy, and basic consumer goods increasing by the day. Despite this, the federal minimum wage remains locked in at $7.25 an hour — a rate that hasn’t increased since 2009 — and while wages have been increasing, they aren’t keeping pace with the cost of living. Meanwhile, the mitigation and management of excessive waste is a concurrent issue. As the initial impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic wane, families who are downsizing their lives or cleaning out their closets face the challenge of finding a new home for their excess stuff — or simply dumping it in a landfill.

Why The Inflation Reduction Act Is Less A ‘Climate Bill’

August 20, 2022 Anthony Rogers-Wright, Black Agenda Report. Educate! climate crisis, Climate Justice, Finance and the Economy, Inflation, Inflation Reduction Act

The brother El Hajj Malik El Shabazz (aka Malcolm X) once explained, “If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” The tale of two narratives associated with the recent signing into law of the so-called Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) accentuates his words at a critical moment. Communities on the frontlines of the climate crisis find themselves entrapped in a cycle of climate cataclysms and cumulative pollution derived from legacy and systemic environmental racism and classism. While attending a meeting in Bogota, Colombia with the newly elected Vice President, Francia Marquez, one of her advisors expressed to me that she was questioning why the demographics of those celebrating passage of a bill purported to address the climate crisis don’t match the demographics of those most impacted by the crisis?

Radical Taxation

August 20, 2022 Vanessa Williamson, Dissent Magazine. Educate! Finance and the Economy, Taxes, wealth inequality

This spring, legislators of both parties, from Connecticut to Georgia, responded to higher energy prices with “gas tax holidays,” temporary tax reductions for consumers that provide an additional windfall to the immensely profitable fossil fuel industry at precisely the moment when we should be ending the global warming economy. Thirty-six years after Grover Norquist first introduced the “taxpayer protection pledge”—by which thousands of legislators have committed to oppose all tax increases—American policymaking remains trapped in an anti-tax paradigm that leaves us unable to cope with the crises we face. Given that the stakes are the habitability of the planet, paradigms might seem a relatively minor concern. But conservative tax opposition can lead us to imagine barriers to climate action that are in fact no great obstacle at all.

Aging US Nuclear Plants Are Dangerous And Expensive

August 19, 2022 Harvey Wasserman, Truthout. Educate! Congress, Finance and the Economy, Inflation Reduction Act, Nuclear Energy

The much-heralded Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), while offering a vital lifeline to the renewable energy industry, also contains massive subsidies to keep dangerously aging atomic power plants operating for years to come. Meanwhile, six decrepit atomic reactors are now caught in a terrifying military crossfire in southeastern Ukraine, showing exactly why it is so important to shut down nuclear plants instead of subsidizing them. The Ukrainian reactors, located at Zaporizhzhia, the largest nuclear power plant in Europe, are now being used as a shield for Russian artillery arrays. A single errant shell could send far more atomic radiation pouring over Europe than did Chernobyl, with an unimaginable toll of downwind death and destruction from which the continent might never recover.

Organized Plunder

August 15, 2022 Elias Rodriques and Clint Williamson, The New Inquiry. Educate! Class Struggle, Finance and the Economy

At the turn of the twentieth century, Brookside, Alabama was a mining town in the orbit of the industrial center of the New South, a region transitioning away from an agrarian economy and into an industrial one. From 1887 until its closing, the Brookside coal mine run by the Sloss Iron and Steel Company produced the coke that fueled blast furnaces in Birmingham. During this period, miners were both native born and immigrant white, the latter being especially constituted by Eastern European workers. They were also Black, a number of whom, we can presume, had been enslaved a mere twenty-three years prior. And some of them were convicts leased out for labor. But all populations took part in the wave of interracial union organizing in the Alabama coal fields led by the United Mine Workers.

Is The US Inflation Reduction Act A Case Of Too Little Too Late?

August 14, 2022 People's Dispatch. Resistance Report Finance and the Economy, Inflation, Inflation Reduction Act

Eugene Puryear of BreakThrough News analyzes the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act which seeks to address inflation, climate change, and healthcare. The US Senate (and subsequently the House of Representatives) passed the Inflation Reduction Act that seeks to tackle issues of inflation, climate change and health care. Will the provisions in the law actually help address these issues? Will the Democrats gain an electoral advantage in the October mid-terms due to this law? Eugene Puryear of BreakThrough News explains.

NDN Collective Responds To House Passing Inflation Reduction Act

August 14, 2022 NDN Collective. Educate! Finance and the Economy, Frontline Community, Inflation, Inflation Reduction Act

Rapid City, South Dakota – In response to today’s news that the House of Representatives passed the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, NDN Collective released the following statement: “To say this moment is bittersweet is an understatement,” said Jade Begay, climate justice director at NDN Collective. “On one hand, the IRA – which puts us on track to meet national climate goals by 2030 and will provide much-needed support around health care, jobs, and infrastructure – was only made possible by the tireless organizing of frontline and Indigenous communities, young people, and climate justice advocates. On the other hand, the IRA dismisses fundamental, decades-long demands by Indigenous, Black, Brown, and low income communities to end fossil fuel expansion and invest in a just transition to renewable energy."

Rebuilding Collective Intelligence

July 31, 2022 David Ridley, Red Pepper. Create! Capitalism, Education, Finance and the Economy, Socialism

Economists, think tanks and journalists have spent billions of words trying to convince everyone that economic growth comes primarily from technological ‘disruption’ and investment by individuals in their own education and training, rather than from exploitation, imperialism and financial speculation. This belief, a key tenet of neoliberalism, continues to shape education policy in England. The Tories hope that by turning education into a market, young people will begin to think of themselves as education consumers, making savvy choices about what degrees will get them the best paid jobs in the future. Meanwhile, universities will supposedly ‘incubate’ new technologies, create the UK’s own Google, Apple or Facebook and kickstart the ailing British economy.

The Shadow Bank That Owns The World

July 29, 2022 Lee Camp, The Most Censored News. Resistance Report BlackRock, Corporations, Finance and the Economy

For most people in America and much of the world, our life is — to some degree — owned, run, managed, or manipulated by a “shadow bank” that few people even know the name of. It holds between 9 and 10 Trillion dollars in assets. It is the largest or close-to largest stake holder in most enormous media companies like Disney and Comcast, most big tech companies like Google and Meta/Facebook, most big banks like Citibank, Bank of America, and Barclays. This secretive cabal is one of the biggest funders of deforestation, fossil fuel use, weapons contractors, and basically destroying the planet. And yet, despite all that, most Americans and most people around the world have never even heard of them. Watch the video to learn who it is that truly owns the planet.

Interest Rate Hikes Will Not Save Us From Inflation

July 28, 2022 Ellen Brown, Scheer Post. Educate! Federal Reserve, Finance and the Economy, Inflation, Public Banking

In prescribing cures for inflation, economists rely on the diagnosis of Nobel laureate Milton Friedman: inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon—too much money chasing too few goods. But that equation has three variables: too much money (“demand”) chasing (the “velocity” of spending) too few goods (“supply”). And “orthodox” economists, from Lawrence Summers to the Federal Reserve, seem to be focusing only on the “demand” variable. The Fed’s prescription is to suppress demand (borrowing and spending) by raising interest rates. Summers, a former U.S. Treasury Secretary who presided over the massive post-2008 bank bailouts, is proposing to reduce demand by raising taxes or raising unemployment rates, reducing disposable income and thus people’s ability to spend.

Ecological Economics: An Introduction

July 26, 2022 Ben Shread-Hewitt, Resilience. Create! Ecology, Environment, Finance and the Economy, Sustainability

Does it make economic sense to cut down a rainforest? What influence should trade have on social policy? How much is the future worth? Is all value equivalent? These are all questions common to ecological economics, a cross-disciplinary science that is attempting to reclaim the field of economics from flawed models and unscientific assumptions. An important act within itself, but one made integral as mainstream economics is driving the planet’s sixth mass extinction (Wagler). Economics is often defined as ‘the allocation of scarce resources to satisfy infinite desires’, but this seemingly impossible aim itself belies many unfounded assumptions. Why should we assume everyone’s desires are infinite, or why should we believe all economic ‘resources’ to be inherently scarce when it is often their economic allocation that creates scarcity?

Energy: The Recession Trigger?

July 17, 2022 Michael Roberts, Labour Outlook. Educate! Finance and the Economy, Inflation, Recession, Worker Rights and Jobs

There is confusion among mainstream economists and policy-makers on whether the major economies are heading for a recession, or are already in a recession; or will avoid one altogether. The majority view, at least in the US, is the latter. This optimistic view argues that, while inflation rates are high, they will start to fall over the next year, enabling the Federal Reserve to avoid hiking its policy interest rates too much to the point where it could restrict investment and spending. At the same time, the US unemployment rate is very low and the ‘labour market’ remains strong. Such a scenario hardly suggests a recession. Who ever heard of a slump where there is full employment?, the argument goes. On the other hand, the pessimistic view is that the major economies are already in a slump that will be eventually recognised.

Wars, Inflation, And Strikes: A Summer Of Discontent In Europe?

July 13, 2022 Josefina L. Martínez , Left Voice. Resist! Finance and the Economy, Strikes, United Kingdom (UK), Wars and Militarism, Worker Rights and Jobs

Are we heading toward a summer of discontent in Europe? Can we foresee a hot autumn on the Continent? It would be hasty to make such statements, but new strike activity is beginning to unfold among sectors of several countries’ working class. Inflation reached 8.8 percent as a European average in May (with higher rates in countries like the UK and Spain). After years of inflation below 1.5 percent, this is a significant change that is causing a fall in the population’s purchasing power, especially among the working class. Many analysts are already talking about the possibility of stagflation: a combination of recession and inflation. This is in addition to the political instability of several governments and a widespread dissatisfaction with the traditional parties. The latter was expressed in France in the last elections, with high abstention and the growth of Marine Le Pen’s far-right party and of the center-left coalition grouped around Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

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