Brief Note On Current Events

There's much dooming and glooming about the current political and economic landscape for a variety of reasons. Inflation, congressional gridlock among them.

Well, I tend not to panic over any individual circumstance or event, but I've begun to wonder.

I live out in the country, right? Miles from anything. We don't have home mail delivery, have to go to the post office to pick up mail. Electricity and natural gas service is available but costly. In fact, the gas association has raised our monthly bill by 80% because they anticipate their costs for gas going up that much. They'll make an adjustment up or down next June. Meanwhile we pay.

Gasoline prices went up from just under $2.00 a gallon all last year to almost $3.50 for a while, then inched back down. Yesterday, I think the posted price was $3.25, and in town it's down to about $3.00. 

Food prices have increased a lot at our local-ish grocery store, up 30% last year on average, and another 25% this year. Some shelves have been bare since the start of the pandemic. Supplies don't arrive. When they do, they are less than ordered. 

The local-ish Walmart in the next town over burned a couple of weeks ago (suspected arson) and there is no date certain for reopening. There is a kind of panic over it because their pharmacy is closed, and patients have few options. The pharmacy closest to us closed just before the fire at Walmart and my prescriptions were transferred to a supermarket pharmacy I've never used. So were a lot of the Walmart pharmacy's prescriptions. I've heard that service is terrible to say the least. This is literally thousands of patients added all at once.

In fact, Walmart had become a kind of regional supply depot, and without it, the surviving local businesses are strapped. They don't have the personnel or supplies to meet the local demand, and for some things you will have to go into Albuquerque -- which is quite a distance if you're shopping.

I wish I could say online ordering is reliable. It's not. If you need something and you order it online, be prepared to wait, weeks in many cases, or be prepared to be told it's not available -- after you order.

It's a crapshoot.

People aren't panicking yet, but there is a lot of tension. Out here we're used to making do and doing without, so the tension isn't as high as it might otherwise be (except among some of the elderly who are very worried about getting their prescriptions.) But I went into town (Albuquerque) to try to stock up on cat food (a precious commodity and sometimes hard to get out here) and tensions were high. Of course it's holiday season, and that's always tough for many people, but this seemed tougher than usual. 

I see that some of the media is deliberately ginning up the tension, too. They're running false stories about inflation, for example, saying that prices for essentials have more than doubled in the past year, gas prices are through the roof, so on and so forth. It's not true, but people feel like it is, partly because that's what they hear on the "news" and partly because they are paying more. Shortages are flogged constantly, but from our perspective out here nothing really essential is in short supply. What is in short supply we've been doing without for a long time and probably don't need.

But... this is "ratcheting." Things are getting harder and harder to get, and prices are going higher and higher. The pandemic is not abating but is coming in wave after wave. Illness and deaths continue to mount, and as medical care and medications are harder to get, people are "falling through the cracks."

I've speculated that the death toll as a consequence of the pandemic -- both from Covid and from neglect of other illnesses -- has easily topped 1,000,000 in this country, god knows how many world-wide. 

Personnel to work in various low-paid and poorly paid positions are scarce. Employers have resisted raising wages, but they have no choice if they plan to continue operating. Some of course won't.

Thee paradigm is still shifting but we're entering uncharted social, political and economic territory. 

Meanwhile, authoritarians of all stripes are marshaling their forces.

Why Didn't Occupy Cause the Kind of Disruption in the United States (and Europe) That The Arab Spring Did in North Africa and the Middle East?

"Red Ink," a new film by Kusha Sefat, may have part of the answer.... Hint: Follow the Money...



Via Occupy.com, via Differentivity

Episode 95: Tilo Jung Continues His Interview With Jeremy Scahill: "Where's The Money?"

Price Shock

Haven't been to the supermarket since I've been sick, so I faced a good deal of price shock when I went to get some Valentines and other supplies at my local discount food market yesterday. Practically every item I buy regularly had gone up in price. Very few had remained stable, none had gone down.

Some of the price rises were significant, 40% or more, and in the case of head lettuce, the price had more than doubled. Bananas and some baked goods were about the only items that seemed to be about the same. Meat prices in general were about 20% more; dairy was pushing 30% more. Frozen items were all up 15% - 20% or more. Bread was, in some cases, 50% more; typically, it was about 30% more. Some snack crackers had doubled in price. Canned goods were mostly 10%-15% more.

I could go on.

I knew from the news that global commodity prices were being driven up by speculators and that the cost of basic supplies for poor and marginal households around the world had become a crushing -- and in many cases an impossible -- burden which has given rise to some of the "unrest" we're seeing so often repeated. The fact that I was seeing these price increases reflected in my own grocery bill is in no way comparable to the real hardships so many people are facing -- including right here at home -- thanks to speculators, weather anomalies, crop failures and so on.

Still, it's a shock.

Also, of course, gasoline prices are shooting up toward $4 a gallon again (at the closest station to us in California, regular gas was $3.49.9 yesterday; it's probably more today), driven in part by hedge funds and speculators as before. This time, however, they are moving more slowly and deliberately to extract whatever "surplus" they can from the American economy. Well, from the Underclass at least.

This tells me we are headed toward another crash, soon. I became convinced that it was the speculator-driven rise in oil and food prices that triggered the financial collapse in 2008 -- ordinary people could not keep up with the price rises, and they cut back suddenly. When they did, the financial house of cards built on ever greater levels of debt collapsed.

We're headed down the same path now. Ordinary people haven't even remotely recovered from the previous crash; in fact, millions and millions more are being forced into what looks like perpetual poverty year over year, and if the deficit hawks get their way (they will, of course), the pace of impoverishment will accelerate, and the numbers will be off the charts.

Those already in poverty at home and abroad cannot even hope to keep up. Their lives and livelihoods are already shattered, for many, permanently. The only real hope they have is to fight back much as those abroad have been doing all over Europe and the Middle East. There's no guarantee of success, and there are many risks to life and limb for those who choose to resist rather than succumb.

But there is no other way. The domestic and global aristos are not going to stop their pillage and plunder on their own. They cannot be sated with "voluntarily" delivered treasure. They know no moral restraint. Another crash will only slow them down temporarily. The only thing the People can do to bring this careening overclass to its senses (if it has any) is to rise up and make it impossible for them -- or at least extremely uncomfortable for them -- to continue on their global campaign of looting and destruction.