“Class warfare lies behind how many politicians, mass media, and academics explain the economic problems requiring the solutions that their policies offer.”
At the end of July, an economic adviser working for Bank of America wrote a memo that got leaked. It made bluntly explicit the long-standing common knowledge among savvy investment advisers: those “economic policies” debated among politicians, economists, and dutiful mass media operate at two different levels. On the public level, debaters discuss what “we” need to do to fix “our economy’s problems.” It reeks of that “we are all in this together” language that reminds us of commercial greeting card poetry. On the other, private level, insiders discuss how the government should respond to economic problems in ways that boost employers’ profits even if at employees’ or the public’s expense. Insiders express their preferred solutions in that nicely neutered term: “policies.”
Inflation, that “problem” torturing capitalist economies these days, offers us the first example of such policies. Inflation is a general increase in prices. Employers,
— source rdwolff.com | Richard Wolff | Aug 30, 2022