How Inflation Endangers the American Oligarchy

And how they can't propagandize their way out of this

The current annual rate of inflation in the United States is now 7.9% and climbing. As the socialist economist Richard Wolff has said, it is a slap in the face to the American working class. Capitalists set prices, not some invisible hand of the marketplace, and they are raising them to increase their profits.

After two years of Covid, recession and supply chain disruptions, after the working class staged an unorganized general strike of sorts by refusing to go back to slave wage jobs and forcing employers to raise wages a noticeable amount for the first time this century, capitalists are getting more than even by jacking up prices so much that those wage gains are being systematically offset and effectively reduced.

Inflation doesn’t affect the top 2% or so, meaning those who make over $300,000 a year, all that much. They can still afford to buy whatever food they want or pay $6 a gallon for gasoline without having to sacrifice any other part of their budget. But the less a family’s income is, the more they have no choice but to cut other things out of their household budgets because they have to eat and to buy gas for the car to get to work and to pay their rent or their mortgage or their property taxes or utilities or what-have-you.

If the rate of inflation substantially exceeds wage increases, it can result in real hunger, and if the government doesn’t step in and effectively do something about that, then history shows that things like food riots, crime, social unrest, and demands for radical political and social change will also increase.

Any American who lived through the 1970s and paid any attention at all knows that nothing pisses off working and middle class people like inflation. Ask Gerald Ford. Ask Jimmy Carter. Joe Biden was around back then, though with his obvious cognitive decline I can’t say for sure that he remembers it all that well.

Some Democrats sure do. That’s why they trotted out old Joe not very long ago to squarely blame Russia for the current bout of inflation.

It didn’t work. A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll shows Biden’s approval rating has plummeted to 40%, more than erasing whatever bump he got for acting tough on Russia after the latter invaded Ukraine. Anyone who had to pay 7 or 8 bucks a pound for ground beef or over 75 bucks to fill up a 15 gallon tank of gas knows that prices were going up and up well before Putin did anything to Ukraine.

Which means they know that Joe Biden and the Democrats are lying to us. Again.

But Biden was only getting started. Today, one of Biden’s people started making noises about American and EU sanctions on China for that country’s refusal to cooperate in sanctions against Russia. The Chinese had already anticipated this, demanding just yesterday that all existing American sanctions on Chinese officials and companies be lifted, and threatening retaliation.

Biden is making one colossally stupid move after another. He embargoed Russian oil and then apparently realized that would create a shortage in the United States. He begged the Saudis to increase oil production and they refused, saying they were considering letting the Chinese buy their oil for yuans instead of dollars. His people went to Venezuela and asked Maduro, who they don’t even recognize as its legitimate president, to sell oil to the US, and the latter said he would be happy to if the US lifts all of its sanctions on his own country, which Biden and his fellow imperialists don’t want to do.

The Chinese are negotiating all over the world to sell their products in just about any other currency than the dollar. Did you know that since Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States sell their oil only in dollars(for now), that 80% of global trade is conducted in dollars? I didn’t until recently, but it’s true. And that figure is already starting to drop.

India announced a deal to buy Russian oil in rupees and rubles. India is also a part of the Chinese Belt & Road Initiative, as is Italy. How long will it be before India, Russia, China, and many other countries start trading in currencies other than the Almighty American Dollar, and what will that mean for Americans?

The answer is simple. The dollar will be devalued. We could be looking a hyperinflation, and it can happen very, very quickly. And if that happens, very serious social unrest is inevitable, and a real Second American Revolution becomes much, much more likely.

To the oh-so-intelligent Ivy League educated servants of the American oligarchy running the federal government, such a revolution is almost literally unthinkable, and they certainly want the rest of us to find it as unthinkable as they. They’ll go on blaming everything and everyone other than themselves for their ongoing disastrous policy failures in the service of kleptocracy, but they are the ones in charge.

And they are the ones who will be blamed when people’s standards of living drastically plummet, and prolonged inflation will do just that. Just like French and Russian aristocrats got blamed once upon a time for their respective failures.

It can happen here. And Joe Biden is making it more likely with nearly every policy decision he makes.

Thank you for reading. Good night, and good luck.