• FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Inflation is systemic and in everything. Food. Housing. Healthcare. Debt.

    Americans are spending more. Doesn’t mean Americans are buying more. Wages haven’t kept pace for most the bottom half of the workforce, the jobs they keep touting are low pay, service or gig work types.

    Remember, the stock market isn’t the economy. Just because businesses are doing okay (doing amazing, actually, record profits!) doesn’t mean the people are- where do you think those profits come from?

    • PoliticalAgitator@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      People will give pretty much anything to not be hungry, sick or homeless and insatiably greedy executives know this.

      The only reason people have anything left after rent and food is because it’s not viable for landlords and companies to work together to strip you of every cent.

      • Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        The only reason people have anything left after rent and food is because it’s not viable for landlords and companies to work together to strip you of every cent.

        God help us when they figure out how.

        • PoliticalAgitator@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          For now, they just operate on a pecking order.

          First, landlords take as much as they can with no regard for how little they do to earn it, nor how much if left is over for their tenants.

          Next at the trough is grocery chains. Like most companies under neoliberalism, they’ve spent 20 years scouring the globe in search of the cheapest, most vulnerable, exploitable people they can and now that they’ve forced out the competition by subsidising chocolate with child slaves, it’s time to jack up the prices.

          Vying for position with food comes utilities, because sitting in the dark half frozen is slightly more tolerable than starving and digging through bins. Energy prices are crippling more and more families despite the companies responsible pocketing handout after handout and being allowed to pump the sky full of carbon and the sea full of oil.

          For millions of people, that’s where the money ends. But if you’ve got any left over, there’s plenty more billionaires in the queue.

          Insurance companies that provide emergency funds in a way that could definitely be socialised but instead has the overhead of greedy executives with a vested interest in denying your claims.

          How about some entertainment? There’s plenty of streaming platforms ready to offer you less content for more money, while still harvesting and selling your data. Maybe pick up a video game that’s riddled with microtransactions.

          Still got money? Make sure nobody mistakes you for a dirty poor by picking up the latest flagship phone, 4% faster than your current phone. Get in fast because you’re not getting a pay rise this year – it’s already been given to the executives.