Tag: Interest Rates

Rail strikes: RMT chief Mick Lynch says Sir Keir Starmer must ‘cosy up to working class people’ to be effective in Opposition + UK Truss government delivers class war budget

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Rail strikes: RMT chief Mick Lynch says Sir Keir Starmer must ‘cosy up to working class people’ to be effective in Opposition

Video via Labour Heartlands

Related:

UK Truss government delivers class war budget

Soaring energy bills ‘price worth paying’ to stand up to Putin, says Liz Truss

Biden adds billions in Ukraine ‘aid,’ pushing total to $70 billion

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

The people of Jackson, Mississippi, have toxic sludge coming out of their kitchen faucets. In some neighborhoods, there isn’t enough water pressure to flush toilets. They’ve gotten, at most, the distracted attention of President Joe Biden.

…

One joker suggested that if the city of Jackson declared itself a part of Ukraine, the $2 billion check would be in the mail tomorrow.

Biden adds billions in Ukraine ‘aid,’ pushing total to $70 billion

Surging cost of living in US drives class tensions to the breaking point

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

The latest inflation data published Tuesday shows that the working class confronts months of immense hardships as wages lose their value in the face of rising living costs. The ruling class’s attempt to make the working class pay for the crisis of capitalism is driving workers into struggle across the world, including in the United States, where teachers, nurses, and possibly railroad workers are launching powerful strikes.

Surging cost of living in US drives class tensions to the breaking point

Rahul Gandhi – The Most Establishment Populist, protests rising prices, lack of jobs

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Rahul Gandhi – The Most Establishment Populist

This ambitious attempt to reconnect with the masses fails to take into account what Gandhi himself acknowledged in London: that the INC was central to building the structures that it now claims have been captured by the BJP and RSS. Gandhi also ignores that the INC [Indian National Congress] itself was central to corrupting these structures.

…

Banerjee’s criticism gets to the heart of the problem that Gandhi faces with the Bharat Jodo Yatra. Looking to the people of India for support to oppose the BJP makes sense, it will indeed take a large supporter base to remove the BJP and release its grip from the tools of power. The INC and Gandhi, however, cannot expect to build such a support base on an anti-corruption and anti-state capture march. As Gandhi himself acknowledged, the INC was central to putting in place the structures of independent India. What he fails to recognize, or acknowledge, is that the INC also has its own very real and recent history of exploiting these very same structures, whether to suspend the rule of law and hold on to power or simply to extract wealth while in power. In the multiparty contest to dethrone Modi, the INC cannot easily pivot from embodying the Indian state itself to campaigning on a populist charge to oppose the deep state.

Related:

India’s main opposition protests rising prices, lack of jobs

BY ASSOCIATED PRESS

NEW DELHI (AP) — Thousands of Indians rallied on Sunday under key opposition Congress party leader Rahul Gandhi, who made a scathing attack on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government over soaring unemployment and rising food and fuel prices in the country.

Notes for Self:

Read More »

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.