Tag: housing markets

Monopolies Cause Inflation, While Fed Chairman Powell Blames Workers

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

As American monopolies fix prices higher and higher, the Federal Reserve bizarrely has concluded that employment is to blame for inflation. For months, Fed chairman Jerome Powell has increased interest rates in the hopes of throwing workers out in the street and thus supposedly reducing prices. While I’m sure that corporate, donor-bought congressmembers appreciate his struggles in the class war against the poor and middle class, it’s all a crock.

Monopolies Cause Inflation, While Fed Chairman Powell Blames Workers

3.8 million tenants in the US could be evicted in the next two months

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

According to the United States Census Bureau, 3.8 million tenants are likely to be evicted in the next two months. Comparatively, only 3.6 million eviction cases were filed in the entire year of 2018. In 2018, the Eviction Lab at Princeton University estimated that there were only 898,479 evictions in 2016, although this number may be a low estimate compared to more recent reports.

3.8 million tenants in the US could be evicted in the next two months

Biden Launches Divisive Attack On MAGA

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Yesterday U.S. president Joe Biden held a speech in Pennsylvania in which he incited the public against those who want to Make America Great Again.

The optics were a bit scary, …

Biden Launches Divisive Attack On MAGA

Related:

New York Times: A Rematch of Biden v. Trump, Two Years Early

The immediate strategy is self-evident. Rather than a referendum on his own presidency, which has been hurt by high inflation and low public morale, Mr. Biden wants to make the election a choice between “normal” and an “extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic,” as he put it on Thursday.

Note that the ‘clear and present danger’ test was applied to Antiwar activists and Communists. The new McCarthyism is anyone against the status quo of war and neoliberalism, as seen by the recent smear campaigns, and blacklists of anyone challenging the Russia-Ukraine conflict narrative and the FBI raids on the Uhuru Movement/African Peoples’ Socialist Party.

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Everyone pays the cost as the rich keep spending

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Everyone pays the cost as the rich keep spending

Meanwhile, the Biden White House is doing what it can to buffer inflationary pain for working people. It has been releasing strategic petroleum reserves in a partly successful effort to lower prices at the pump, extending pandemic-era caps on some student loan payments and pushing for antitrust action in areas where corporate concentration (which has grown hand in hand with financialisation) may be responsible for some inflationary pressure.

But more changes are needed. The success of corporate lobbyists in overturning efforts to roll back carried interest loopholes are shameful. Student debt forgiveness — no matter how generous it is — will not change the fact that the cost of four years of private university in the US (an elastic cost that can be bid up indefinitely by the global rich) is nearly double the median family income. Housing markets continue to cry out for major reform.

I suspect it will take a younger generation to push through these sorts of systemic changes. They simply don’t have as much asset wealth to protect.