Newspaper headlines scream that inflation is here to stay. Consumer prices rose 6.2% on average last year, the largest increase since 1991. Although Americans assume — in the words of the New York Times — “full of money and jobs,” they are a disgrace to the state of the economy.
No wonder Republicans are happy to draw the line between inflation and public concerns about the economy and Joe Biden’s presidency.
Surprisingly, President Biden is helping them himself, citing his administration, putting more money in people’s pockets as part of the explanation for the current rise in inflation. “You all got $1,400 in checks,” Biden said in a November 10 speech. “I got checks for a lot of things,” and with the patience of an academic who taught Economics 101, he clarified, “Well, with more people with money buying a product and fewer products to buy, what happens? … Prices are going up.”
The New York Post, a newspaper with conservative leanings, jumped on the speech, claiming that the president “recognizes that his COVID stimulus controls [the] high inflation.”
It is not normal to be at the mercy of an economy designed by profitable companies.
The newspaper played down the importance of Biden’s assertion that “the supply chain is to blame.” Indeed, the president led his audience by vividly explaining how the globalization of the economy works, artificially lowering the cost of goods for decades, and exposure to disruptions like those caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Products such as smartphones often assemble parts from France and Italy; chips from the Netherlands; touch screens from New York State. Camera components from Japan — a supply chain that stretches across dozens of countries,” Biden said.
Then he concluded: “This is just the nature of the modern economy – the world economy,” as if the gigantic network of consumer production was a fact of nature and not a systematically disorganized system designed by multinational corporations to reduce the cost of materials and divorce. and maximize their profits.
I remember that was exactly what it was, they’ve revolted the anti-globalization movement since the 1990s. According to a 2007 article by Mark Engler, protesters included “unionists, environmentalists, anarchists, land and indigenous rights activists, organizations promoting human rights and sustainable development, opponents of privatization and anti-abuse activists” from around the world. who claimed that “the policies of corporate globalization have exacerbated global poverty and increased inequality.”
When Biden explained in his speech that “you have to use wood from Brazil and graphite from India before they meet in a US factory to get a pencil,” he didn’t reveal that pencil manufacturers get wood from Brazil because they can trust him. Logged in illegally in amazon, this leads to lower prices for timber. Not to say that the costs of transporting goods from the far reaches of the world generate massive carbon pollution that leads to climate change.
Rather than blaming inflation for globalization, he concluded that it is “the nature of the modern economy” on which we depend. Most of the media also missed this contact. Instead, the increasingly rare cases where the US government ensures that people have enough money to live is to blame.
Why are Americans dissatisfied with the state of the economy? Apparently, according to Bloomberg Ramesh Ponoro, it’s a pattern “time and again” that when wages rise, pessimism is widespread. He rightly points out that “wages and benefits have increased intelligently, but only in nominal terms,” and that “positive trends must continue before people begin to realize their satisfaction.”
Consult studies conducted even before the pandemic (for example, this one is from 2018, this one is from 2019) and one can find widespread concerns about the state of the economy. In other words, Americans have been frustrated for decades by persistent wage suppression and the trend of increasingly precarious jobs in the so-called “labour economy.”
This may be the reason why record numbers of people continue to quit despite their desperation for the economy. The latest Bureau of Labor Statistics report found that 4.4 million workers left their jobs in September alone, continuing the trend seen in August.
In addition to workers seeking better-paying jobs, the Washington Post concluded that the smoking cessation trend was also linked to “difficulty finding childcare.”
But if conservative Republicans have their way, you’ll see assurances that Americans are so unhappy that the government is spending money on them and that childcare subsidies and stimulus packages are the cause of the mass depression — all of which point to the restoration of political power. In the next election cycle to reduce spending.
These kinds of conservative posts contain accusations that Biden “doesn’t understand how much inflation is affecting Americans” and “[i]If congressional Democrats don’t stop the Biden and Pelosi plan, many Americans won’t be able to pay their heating bills this winter,” the press release states. The Conservative Growth Club’s advertisements, targeting weak House Democrats, are.
Conservative Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia has made similar calls to justify his frustration with Biden’s proposals to expand government aid.
The Liberal Democrats’ response to the current economic crisis is not much better, advising people to either wait for inflation or claim that the demand for better wages is fueling inflation.
“Higher minimum wages, stronger unions, higher employee benefits, and stricter regulations are all desirable, but they also increase operating costs and prices,” Larry Summers, a former economic adviser to the Obama administration, wrote earlier this year. Echoing a Republican claim that unemployment benefits have been bad for the economy, Summers said, “The unemployment benefits that allow workers not to do more work than they did in September should definitely run out.”
The dominant message to Americans from political elites across the spectrum is the same as Biden made clear in his speech: “This is just the nature of the modern economy,” and we have to deal with it.
The best feature of our current economic situation is that we are not naturally at the mercy of the whims and vagaries of an economy designed by corporate recipients.
Sonali Kolhatkar
Independent Media Institute
This article was created by Economy for allIndependent Media Institute project.
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