IMO Urges More Efforts as World Marks Women in Maritime Day

IMO calls for more efforts to support equality and enhance the workforce (IMO)

PUBLISHED MAY 17, 2024 6:58 PM BY THE MARITIME EXECUTIVE

 

 

Organizations around the globe marked the annual Women in Maritime Day, on May 18, highlighting the advancements women are making in the field while calling for continued actions for training and to support equality. The International Maritime Organization marked the day with its 36th annual program while also urging the industry to invest in the future by ensuring gender equality. 

To highlight the continuing inequalities, the IMO cited data saying that currently only 29 percent of the overall maritime workforce and 20 percent of the workforce of national maritime authorities are women. They reported that despite all the efforts globally, women make up less than two percent of seafarers worldwide.

“We must – and will- do more,” said Arsenio Dominguez, the Secretary-General speaking at the IMO event to mark the day. “By investing in women’s education and professional development, we empower women, drive innovation, and foster sustainability within the maritime industry, to benefit of all.”

The numbers show slow progress and growth from a minuscule base. For example, the industry trade group BIMCO and the ICS did a survey in 2021 that reported women only represented 1.2 percent of the global seafarer workforce. While saying it was a 45.8 percent increase versus 2015, UN officials highlighted that it was possibly one of the lowest levels in any industry.

“Today is an opportunity to honor the remarkable achievements of women in the maritime sector while advocating for gender equality and inclusivity in this vital industry,” said the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) Executive Director Policy and Regulation Leanne Loan. “Elevating female role models, embracing diverse perspectives, and fostering collaboration, is vital to a safer, more inclusive maritime sector.”

The IMO's Women in Maritime program, initiated in 1988, takes a three-pronged approach of “training-visibility-recognition” for women. Under the theme of “Safe Horizons: Women Shaping the Future of Maritime Safety,” live broadcast one hour-45-minute symposium featuring a line-up of seafarers, maritime professionals, and maritime leaders. 

Education and training was one of the persistent themes from many organizations. The UN Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC) for example highlighted its efforts at advancing women into one of the most difficult sectors of the maritime world. Through its Global Maritime Crime Program (GMCP), and in cooperation with the Sri Lanka Navy, in August 2023 they conducted the first Inshore Patrol Craft (IPC) navigation training for female officers in Southeast Asia. The one-month training, incorporating both theoretical knowledge and practical exercise of running an IPC vessel at sea, helped strengthen the participants’ boat navigation skills, thus preparing them for a commanding duty in the future.

“Change is both necessary and coming…,” said Dominguez. “With increase in trade and the transition towards a greener and more sustainable sector, the opportunities to enhance diversity and inclusion are in front of us.”

The IMO points to emerging industry issues such as the rise of digitalization and automation as well as green technology in the sector. They highlight that these issues will require new skills and potentially signal new career opportunities for women. 

Domingues concluded by calling on all the participants in the program, and around the globe, to look at how they can drive understanding, awareness, and change within their organizations and help achieve the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and in particular Goal 5 to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.

 

UK Royal Fleet Auxiliary Officers to Launch First Job Action Says Nautilus

RFA is currently assisting with the Gaza aid efforts as part of its RN supply role (RN)

PUBLISHED MAY 17, 2024 8:06 PM BY THE MARITIME EXECUTIVE

 

The officers of the UK’s Royal Fleet Auxiliary, the civilian support service for the Royal Navy, will start a work slowdown according to their union Nautilus International. It is the latest step in a long-running dispute over wages but will stop short of a full-on strike. 

Hundreds of Nautilus members working onboard RFA vessels, which include the Royal Navy’s fleet of tankers and supply ships, starting June 1 will only undertake work responsibilities commensurate with their job title according to Nautilus. They are emphasizing that this is an “action short of a strike,” where the members will “not provide cover or act in a capacity above or below their job title.”

Nautilus acknowledges the vital contribution and role in the national defense of the RFA. As such, they are emphasizing that members will continue to work in full compliance with all safety guidelines and policies, ensuring the safety of people, the safety of the vessel, and the safety of the environment at all times. 

“However, after 14 years of pay austerity – representing more than a 30 percent real-terms cut in wages – and a resulting recruitment and retention crisis, they have finally had enough and have made the momentous decision to undertake industrial action for the first time in RFA history,” says Nautilus executive director Martyn Gray.

Nautilus has been threatening some form of job action for months reporting in November 2023 that it was planning to conduct a ballot among members for an industrial action. They are now saying that an overwhelming 85 percent voted “yes to action short of a strike,” while 79 percent also voted to support a full-on strike.

“It is now up to the UK government to put forward a serious offer, one that reflects their hard work and the essential role that they play in defense of this country, so that this dispute can be ended with a fair settlement for RFA personnel.,” said Gray.

Nautilus International says it has conducted a series of meetings with RFA, Royal Navy, and Ministry of Defence representatives, each trying to try to resolve the pay dispute. They contend that the organization has received no offer that members are “able to accept,” reporting in September 2023 membership voted to reject a 4.5 percent raise offer. With no further movement, Nautilus says the situation has now been escalated further.

The RMT (National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers) represents other portions of the RFA workforce and it too is locked in prolonged negotiations with the UK government primarily over wages. The RFA offered the same 4.5 percent wage increase to RMT members and the union responded by announcing in October it planned to conduct its strike vote.

Both unions emphasize that it has never come to a strike in the past and hope it will not this time. However, they contend it was a close call in 2019 when the RFA offered just a 1.5 percent increase.

They contend that RFA members have consistently seen their pay fall below other services, such as the armed forces, police, fire, and ambulance.

 

ILWU Canada Delays Strike Notice for DP World’s Vancouver Terminals

Local representing ship and dock foreman delayed a strike notice at DP World's Vancounver contaienr terminal (Port of Vancouver file photo)

PUBLISHED MAY 16, 2024 5:00 PM BY THE MARITIME EXECUTIVE

 

 

Canadian officials are again preparing for a potential strike that would impact DP World Canada’s West Coast operation, including the second-largest Vancouver container terminal, while holding out hope for a new round of federal mediation. Yesterday, May 15, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 514 agreed to delay serving a 72-hour strike notice. So far, the contract negotiations however remain deadlocked.

The Local represents over 700 ship and dock foremen working at terminals including DP World Canada’s Centerm container terminal in Vancouver. The facility was expanded in 2023 increasing capacity by 60 percent to 1.5 million TEU annually. It operates six gantry cranes on two berths and is separate from Deltaport operated by GCT which is the larger Vancouver container terminal. DP World Canada also operates the Nanaimo (Duke Point) break bulk and Fraser Surrey multipurpose terminal as well as at Prince Rupert on the West Coast.

Union leadership said it is doing everything it can to avert a potential strike at the port while noting that the local’s contract expired on March 31, 2023. Bargaining began at the end of May and with pauses continued till January 2024 when the BC Maritime Employers Association (BCMEA) negotiating on behalf of DP World filed a Notice of Dispute. That triggered a 60-day Conciliation Period and attempts at federal mediation. That was followed by a Cooling Off period that expired on May 10.

Canada’s West Coast ports suffered a devastating strike in 2023 that stopped container movements. The federal government recently launched a commission to investigate the 2023 circumstances to prevent a repeat, but elected officials are worried that another disruption is in the offing now with the Local. 

BCMEA contends that the 2023 strike caused a C$10.7 billion (US$7.9 billion) loss due to disrupted and diverted cargo. They also say that much of the diverted business never returned to Canadian ports. 

Both sides are now free to move toward either a strike or lockout but under Canadian labor rules they would have to be a vote and then filing of a 72-hour notice. The Local has taken its vote and was prepared to file its notice but said it was willing to wait while an effort was underway to try and restart the negotiations. They however are accusing the BCMEA of being misleading and trying to negotiate in the media.

The local is demanding direct talks with DP World Canada saying under arbitration its rights were confirmed. They contend the impasse centers around three issues, including the use of semi-automation at the container terminal without bargaining for a tech change. They are in arbitration over centralized dispatching and are also opposing the use of management instead of union members as dispatchers at the Nanaimo terminal. The local contends the arbitration already ruled against this third point.

The BCMEA accuses the local of “intransigence at the bargaining table,” saying it was left with no choice but to file a complaint with the Canada Industrial Relations Board last week. They contend that a generous offer was made for a four-year contract with a 19.2 percent wage increase, a signing bonus, and a 16 percent increase in retirement benefits. There would also be retroactive pay to April 1, 2023.

Businesses fear that Canadian commerce and trade could be brought to a halt by a series of strikes including DP World, but also a threat against Canadian rail and another at the East Coast ports. The rail strike could begin as early as next week involving both CP Rail and CN, Canada’s two carriers, but last Thursday, May 9, Canada’s Labor Minister Seamus O’Regan intervened asking the Canada Industrial Relations Board to review the situation.

Wealthier voters in poorer areas most likely to have voted Brexit, new study finds

Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead 

Today
Left Foot Forward

PETITE BOURGEOISIE

Because of greater financial security particularly home-ownership, more affluent voters were less wary of the potential risks of changing the status quo.

Since the 52-48 percent vote in favour of leaving the European Union in June 2016, the correlation between wealth and how people voted in the 2016 EU referendum has been widely researched and discussed. It is broadly acknowledged that voters in economically deprived and left-behind areas were more likely to have voted to leave the European Union. But a new study has found that while poorer areas were more supportive of exiting the EU, wealthier people within these areas were more inclined to have voted for Brexit.

The ‘Mind the Gap: Why Wealthy Voters Support Brexit’ report by the King’s College London was published in early May in the British Journal of Political Science. It found that because of greater financial security particularly home-ownership, more affluent voters were less wary of the potential risks of changing the status quo.

Conversely, younger voters, who were less likely to have security against economic shocks and did not own property, were more likely to have voted to remain, as they were more risk averse.

“People living in left-behind areas were more likely to support Brexit than those living in prosperous areas. The gains of Brexit were perceived to be greater in areas of the country that had experienced economic decline. But within those areas, given people’s preferences, we show that wealthier individuals were more likely to vote for Brexit, and poorer individuals were more likely to vote for Remain,” said the authors.

The study involved analysing data from a British Election Study internet panel and several Bank of England panel surveys surrounding income and expenditure in 2016 – 2018. Both panels included information on a participant’s political preferences and wealth. Across the two panels, the researchers found the likelihood of a Leave vote increased as property wealth increased. The Bank of England data showed that the standard deviation increase in property wealth increased Leave support by as much as 7.1 percentage points.

Noting how wealth provides self-assurance against financial risk, thereby reducing risk aversion, the authors said: “We apply this insurance mechanism to electoral behaviour, arguing that a voter who desires a change to the status quo and who is wealthy is more likely to voted for change than a voter who lacks the same self-assurance.”

“Studying the effect of wealth in the Brexit case, we found that variation in personal wealth – especially property wealth – enabled wealthier individuals to support Brexit and less wealthy individuals to support Remain,” said the researchers.

The King’s College London research follows a study in April which found the majority of British voters now regret Brexit. Research by UK in a Changing Europe (UKICE), found that because as many as 16-20 percent of those who voted to leave have switched sides, compared with only 6 percent of those who voted to remain, the balance has swung against Brexit.

UK

DWP to hire ‘external agents’ in crackdown on benefit fraud that government’s own data shows doesn’t exist

Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead

Today

LEFT FOOT FORWARD


‘If the government is concerned about fraud, it would be serious about the £15.2bn that multinational companies hide from the UK via tax havens.’

As the government continues to crack down on so-called benefit fraud and reform the welfare system with stricter measures, newly released statistics by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) show that there were almost no recorded cases of disability fraud in the financial year ending 2024.

Disability Living Allowance fraud was just 0.1 percent, rounded off to £0m. Personal independence payment (PIP) cheating was found to be 0 percent in the same period, the data showed.

PIP overpayments represented 0.4 percent, equating to around £90m lost in a year, marking a significant decrease from the previous year, when such overpayments stood 1.1 percent (£200m). The overpayments were said to be mainly due to errors made by the department when allocating award levels at the assessment stage.

In response to the DWP’s figures, Mikey Erhardt, campaigner at Disability Rights UK described PIP fraud as a ‘non-issue.’

“New data shows what we, as disabled people, have known for years – PIP fraud is a non-issue. PIP fraud is now the lowest on record – despite the government placing fraud front and centre of their latest public announcements,” said Erhardt.

“If the government is concerned about fraud, it would be serious about the £15.2bn that multinational companies hide from the UK via tax havens. Money which could fund public services that we all need and use. Instead, disabled people continue to be demonised,” he added.

Official figures also showed that benefit claimants were underpaid by £3.3bn last year, the highest level on record, despite a government drive to eliminate a ‘sick-note culture’ and crack down on benefit fraud.

In its ‘Fraud Plan’ published on May 13, the DWP announced it was hiring 2,500 ‘external agents’ to ‘help spot incorrectness in Universal Credit claims.’ Artificial Intelligence will also feature in the ‘crackdown’,’ with the DWP investing £70m into high-tech ‘machine learning’ in an attempt to identify patterns and anomalies being used in welfare applications that could suggest fraud. Additionally, DWP investigators will be given powers to conduct searches and make arrests, as well as retrieving information from the bank accounts of claimants.

Mel Stride, secretary of state for work and pensions, said: “We are scaling up the fight against those stealing from the taxpayer, building on our success in stopping £18bn going into the wrong hands in 2022-23.”

The Anti-Colonial Marxism of Mahdi Amel

The Lebanese Marxist thinker Mahdi Amel was assassinated on this day in 1987. Amel developed a version of Marxism that was grounded in the experience of colonized societies, showing how class struggle converges with the fight for national liberation.

Lebanese Marxist Mahdi Amel. (Archives of Assafir Newspaper)

BYHICHAM SAFIEDDINE
05.18.2024
JACOBIN

With rare exceptions, non-Western theorists of Marxism receive short intellectual shrift. When they register on the radar of ideological debates at all, such debates summarily present their work as proof of Marxism’s universalism rather than a means of transforming Marxism itself.

This has largely been the case with the Arab Marxist Mahdi Amel, who was assassinated on this day, May 18, in 1987. Born in 1936, Hassan Hamdan, who later adopted the pen name Mahdi Amel, was a member of the Lebanese Communist Party and had joined the party’s national leadership by the time he was killed.

Amel’s legacy did experience a revival during the Arab uprisings that broke out a decade ago. His work garnered further attention after a volume of his selected writings was translated into English in 2021. But interest in his philosophy of Marxism and its implications for how we understand colonialism in relation to capitalism remains rudimentary.

A historical materialist reading of Amel would integrate his conceptual contribution and praxis into the ideological canon of twentieth-century Marxism. This requires a sustained and critical analysis of his philosophy’s assumptions, arguments, and conclusions in comparison and contrast to European Marxism as well as heterodox or radical schools of Marxism that emerged after World War II, such as dependency theory and racial capitalism.

We can take a modest step in that direction by briefly examining his methodology and its application to major themes of post-WWII national liberation, including the ongoing struggle for a free Palestine.

Marxism, Colonialism, and Methodology

Amel called for a “methodological revolution” in Marxist philosophy in order to understand and overcome the historical reality of colonialism. He opposed the application of preformed Marxist thought to the colonial social structure, but not in the name of some supposedly authentic precapitalist thought. He equally rejected forms of postcolonial analysis that threw the historical materialist baby out with its Euro-centric bathwater. Instead, Amel labored in a dialectical fashion to construct a theory of Marxism born out of colonial social reality and employed for its socialist liberation, which he argued, is also the liberation of all humanity.

Amel laid out the logic of his methodology, first in brief and later in detail, across a series of essays and book-length treatises. He then applied it to a wide range of historical phenomena and forces including sectarianism, Islam, education, and revolutionary culture. These writings were engaged in direct conversation with ideological debates that emerged during his age and remain relevant to ours.Mahdi Amel called for a ‘methodological revolution’ in Marxist philosophy in order to understand and overcome the historical reality of colonialism.

While Amel’s texts may be dense and at times repetitive, his reasoning was straightforward. Karl Marx’s discussion of colonialism was incidental to his general analysis of capitalism. Given Marx’s own historical context in a capitalist Europe and his ignorance of the socioeconomic conditions of colonized countries, he was incapable of taking full stock of colonialism and incorporating it into his theory of capitalism.

The historical reality of colonized peoples is the inverse of that experienced by Marx. Their encounter with capitalism was incidental to, or mediated via, colonialism. Colonization, in the words of Amel, “cut the thread of continuity” in their history and “sent through it violent tremors.”

He believed these tremors reached all the way to the strata of the relations of production, as the material basis for precapitalist production was destroyed while the material basis for industrialization was denied. To put it another way, the difference between capitalist and colonial social formations does not merely concern the level or scale of production, but the entire structure of production.


For Amel, it follows from this point that the colonial relation, which is all-encompassing rather than purely economic, is the fundamental contradiction in colonized societies and that colonialism is the “objective basis for the colonized country’s social structure.” Consequently, colonialism does not end with the end of military occupation or by gaining political independence, but with the total severance of this relation in a process of violent and revolutionary transition to socialism.

Amel’s inquiry along these lines yielded the concept of the colonial mode of production (CMOP), which he defined as “the form of capitalism structurally dependent on imperialism in its historical formation and contemporary development.” Marx’s distilled observations on colonialism furnished Amel with a sound theoretical basis to develop his model. In each step, Amel drew on Marx’s relevant commentary and identified first principles.

For instance, Amel relied on Marx’s reference to the “fusion” of modes of production and on Vladimir Lenin’s description of different modes coexisting in a single social space to support the idea of a colonial mode of production as a fusion of capitalist and precapitalist modes of production under the rubric of colonial conquest, and thereby distinct from either. This methodology retained Marxian logic and concepts like class formation, class struggle, capitalization, and class consciousness, but tried to elucidate their specific historical form in a colonial setting.

Colonialism and Class Struggle

Amel’s theorization led him to conclude that the process of class formation under a CMOP is characterized by a lack of class differentiation. Thanks to the structural inhibition of large-scale industry, the colonial bourgeoisie is necessarily a mercantile rather than an industrial bourgeoisie.The instability of rule in colonized countries is a result of the stability of the colonial social structure, not a reflection of orientalist proclivities for military rule or dictatorship.

Small-scale manufacturers in this context are a faction of the petty bourgeoisie, whose members occasionally engage in finance on a similar scale. This apparent diversity in economic activity is not due to some “excess energy” of this social class, but rather stems from the limitations upon concentrating production.

These constrained economic relations of production had political implications. Tied in its own class existence to its colonialist or capitalist counterpart, the colonial bourgeoise is incapable of carrying out a political revolution and establishing a liberal democracy in its European bourgeois form. The instability of rule in colonized countries is therefore a result of the stability of the colonial social structure, not a reflection of orientalist proclivities for military rule or dictatorship.

An extreme case of the lack of class differentiation is the fusion of the two social factions, urban merchants tied to foreign trade and landowners who direct their agricultural production toward colonial trade. This fusion negates the existence of either a national bourgeoisie, usually associated with industrialists, or a feudal class, usually associated with a colonial alliance.

Similarly, the process of proletarianization of the colony’s toiling masses — prominently peasants — is never complete at the economic or social level. Given the centrality of land in colonial agricultural production, which is concentrated around cash crops and extractive labor, peasants are the overexploited class under the CMOP.

When peasants migrate to urban centers seeking employment relief, they rarely, according to Amel, experience a radical transformation in terms of class existence and consciousness. Although embedded in a new class position that involves small-scale consumer industry, they preserve their previous class connections and retain much of their past class consciousness, transitioning between the two positions with ease.

Amel described the pattern in Lebanon:


The worker returns to his village at every opportunity, for holidays, vacations, and funerals. In this way, his village becomes his centre of gravity and exerts a pull over him stronger than that of the city. Ultimately, he longs for the land he left and demands to be buried there, home to his ancestors.

Amel warned that the lack of class differentiation does not mean that class struggle is absent in the colonial setting, as nationalist forces would have it. Nor does it mean the national question is insignificant, as some anti-imperialist or internationalist Marxists would have it. Given the indirect relation of exploitation under a CMOP that is governed by the colonial relation, class struggle is directed against a structure of dependency and domination, not another social class. This means that socialist revolution in colonized societies is synonymous with national liberation:


The struggle for national liberation is the sole historical form that distinguishes class struggle in the colonial formation. Whoever misses this essential point in the movement of our modern history and attempts to substitute class struggle with “nationalist struggle” or reduces the national struggle to a purely economic struggle loses the ability to understand our historical reality and thus also to control its transformation.

Amel prevented his philosophy from lapsing into determinism or economism by placing his structural analysis in a historical perspective as he theorized class struggle.

He emphasized the nature of class consciousness as a historical force of class becoming and resistance. He argued that before World War II, sectoral and economic forms of struggle by different factions of the toiling masses independent of each other precluded their very formation as a class. The period after 1945 saw these struggles converging in a broader political struggle for liberation from colonialism.

At that moment, the colonial relation became mutually constitutive of colonizing and colonized societies. It is necessary to sever this relation in order to transcend, and thereby destroy, both capitalist and colonial social structures.The global ascendance of neoliberalism in the 1970s precipitated a conservative, culturalist turn across the Arab region.

The global ascendance of neoliberalism in the 1970s precipitated a conservative, culturalist turn across the Arab region. Amel’s intellectual labor focused on pertinent questions of culture and the growing role of religion, namely Islam, in politics.

In contrast with other Arab leftists or secularists such as Sadiq Jalal al-Azm and Adonis, Amel’s thought did not lapse into orientalist tropes. He countered the ideology of defeat that ascribed the Arab loss in the 1967 war with Israel to cultural rather than military factors and lambasted the Arab bourgeoisie for portraying their own political failings as universal failings of Arab civilization and cultural heritage.

For Amel, turath, or cultural heritage, was itself a problem of the interpretation of the past by a colonial present rather than a precolonial problem that persisted in the contemporary world. At the same time, Amel avoided absolutist perspectives toward Islam of the kind to be found in secular or communist polemics that saw Islam as being inherently reactionary.
Islam and Revolutionary Thought

By the 1980s, the culturalist turn led to the emergence of what Amel called “everyday” thought. He warned against this new discourse that depoliticized social struggle by ignoring the role of geopolitics, structural forces of history, and class interests as motivations in sectarian or regional conflicts.

Amel developed critiques of different manifestations of this new trend, some of which he categorized as nihilist, obscurantist, or Islamized bourgeois currents. His denunciation of the latter current did not lead him to dismiss Islam as an ontologically regressive force at all stages of history. Unlike many scholars of Islamic intellectual history who saw the primary contradiction in Islam — or any other religion — as being that between faith and atheism, or between religious and rational thought, Amel identified a dividing line between those who defer to power and those who defy it.

The traditional classification of precapitalist Islamic scholars is one example. Conventional scholarship associated progressive thought with reason, exemplified in the figure of Ibn Rushd (Averroes), while ascribing conservatism to philosophies that elevated religion or belief over reason, exemplified in the figure of al-Ghazali. Amel argued that such a classification was simplistic and rested on the assumption that reason was a monolith.The different manifestations of Islam demonstrate, according to Amel, that Islam was never a singular force.

He pointed out that one could find a single scholar, such as Ibn Khaldun, invoking scientific reasoning as well as Salafi legal reasoning. These contradictory forms of reason remained within a religious logic or paradigm, which meant that they were never fully antithetical to each other. As a result, subversive thought, as expressed in illuminationist Sufi Islam, took the form of rejecting reason in toto.

For Amel, the primary contradiction was not between religion and earthly life, but between two concepts of religion: spiritual (Sufi) and temporal (juridical). Spiritual Islam, however, was not atemporal in a metaphysical sense. Islam, by force of historical becoming, was temporal and by extension political. Sufism, or certain strands of it, negates the institutionalization of Islam, which turned it into an authoritarian apparatus.

The different manifestations of Islam demonstrate, according to Amel, that Islam was never a singular force. It was Islam’s material rather than otherworldly existence that determined its reactionary or revolutionary character, even if, in Amel’s estimation, it had mostly served the interests of the ruling classes.

He identified notable exceptions to this rule in precapitalist Islamic societies that included the revolt against the third “Rightly Guided” Caliph, ‘Uthman Ibn Affan, in the period following the death of Muhammed, as well as a certain phase of Qarmatian rule in Arabia. Modern examples that Amel cited of Islam forming part of a revolutionary struggle in the age of national liberation included the Algerian War of Independence and armed resistance against Israel.
Revolution, Liberation, and the Palestinian Cause

Amel’s treatment of the Algerian revolution and resistance to Israel shed light on the particularities of class struggle under colonialism, which included the role of noneconomic factors such as racism and cultural identity. In the case of Algeria, Amel noted that the overwhelming majority of European settlers, whether they were artisans, farmers, bourgeois, or workers, opposed the revolution for national liberation.

The politicized working class was no exception. The working-class Algiers district of Bab el-Oued had been nicknamed the “red neighbourhood” for serving as a popular base of the Algerian Communist Party. Yet it became “a haven of European racism” and “centre of fascist European terrorism against the revolution” after the outbreak of the war of independence.

The same anti-colonial logic applies to theorizing class struggle in Palestine. So-called labor Zionism was a racialized ideology complicit in the oppression of Palestinian workers and peasants and as such cannot be characterized as socialist. By contrast, Amel saw the Palestinian struggle for liberation from colonialism as a force of revolutionary class struggle.

The failure of Arab communist parties to recognize this distinction and their willingness to blindly follow Moscow’s directive led the leadership of these parties to support the 1948 partition of Palestine. They rationalized this decision by a simplistic depiction of the conflict as a struggle between workers, both Arab and Jew, and a mercantile and landed bourgeoise, both Arab and Jew. It caused the communist movement to suffer a loss of popular support in Arab societies.Amel saw the Palestinian struggle for liberation from colonialism as a force of revolutionary class struggle.

In the case of Lebanon, the Communist Party’s revision of its pro-partition stance in the late 1960s and its alliance with the Palestinian liberation movement was a radicalizing force that had an impact on class struggle in Lebanon itself. Following the Israeli invasion of 1982, Amel ridiculed left-wing pundits who minimized the significance of successful armed resistance against Israeli occupation in the name of focusing on strengthening the central Lebanese state at a time of right-wing Phalangist hegemony.

Israel’s own attitude toward Lebanese and Palestinian political factions was and remains determined in the last instance by the decision of those movements to adopt or reject national liberation strategies, including armed resistance, regardless of whether their ideology is secular or religious. For Amel, the significance of armed resistance to Israel and its allies derives from the objective centrality of the colonial relation in determining the character of class struggle in a colonial context.

Unlike many leftists of his time, Amel was careful to assess Islamist resistance forces in relation to this structural contradiction without ignoring the role of political (and therefore subjective) consciousness in swaying this struggle toward a socialist or progressive horizon. In 1984, when sectarian Islamist forces rebelled against pro-Israeli sectarian Christian forces in Beirut, Amel identified the objective revolutionary significance of the military victory, while stressing that it was uncertain whether this victory would point toward the end of sectarianism or its reproduction:

Either they go against the reactionary sectarian form of their ideological consciousness, i.e. in the direction of radically changing the sectarian political system of rule by the dominant bourgeoisie, or they align with this same reactionary sectarian consciousness — (but against the class interests of their toiling factions) — and lean towards sectarian reform of this system. In the latter case, the system would catch its breath in a movement that would renew its crisis, and subsequently the conditions for civil war.

There is no sectarian crisis in Palestine similar to that of Lebanon. But the leading armed resistance forces today in Palestine and across the region are Islamist in their ideology. Analyzing this resistance without centering the colonial relation, as Amel showed elsewhere, is a methodological error that mischaracterizes its revolutionary role as the latest stage in the war of national liberation.

The twentieth-century global conjuncture of national liberation may have passed in relation to other regions of the world. The colonial social reality of Palestinians, however, remains unchanged, as does their right to resist by all means necessary. A Marxist analysis that ignores this primary contradiction is bound to repeat the mistake of early Arab communists, and, in this case, contrary to Marxist tradition, the second version will be as tragic as the first.

CONTRIBUTOR
Hicham Safieddine is an associate professor of history at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Banking on the State: The Financial Foundations of Lebanon (2019) and the editor of Arab Marxism and National Liberation: Selected Writings of Mahdi Amel (2021).

How the Big Lie is meant to finish off America

A group of pro-Trump protesters climb the walls of the Capitol Building after storming the West lawn on January 6, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Jon Cherry/Getty Images)
D. Earl StephensMay 17, 2024

On Tuesday, November 3, 2020, America began tallying the vote to see who would be her next president.

Would the poisonous orange tide that had gripped and gagged her the previous four years finally drag her down for good after 244 years of resiliently staying afloat and rising above it all through Civil Wars, World Wars, killer pandemics and her greatest sin?

Predictably, it was an agonizingly close election thanks to our antiquated, racist Electoral College, but at 11:26 a.m. ET on Saturday, November 7, the Associated Press called the race for Democracy’s darling, Joe Biden.

An audible sigh of relief echoed through the countryside, and freedom rang. Anybody who cares even a little about Lady Liberty knows where they were, and what they did when they heard that gust of joyous news.

After four long, gruesome years, enough Americans had answered the call, and used their votes to remove the ghastly, orange, woman-abusing racist from office.

We had beat the bastards fair and square at the ballot box and were finally safe and sound.

Biden would go on to rack up 306 electoral votes to Donald Trump’s 232 in perhaps the most important election in American history. The man who faithfully served his country for nearly 50 years as a Senator from Delaware, and Vice President to Barack Obama, had vanquished the dullard who had served only himself over the crooked course of his long, miserable lifetime.

The popular tally wasn’t even close, as Biden absolutely demolished The Big Liar by more than seven million votes, or the combined populations of Arkansas, Mississippi, and South Dakota.

It was a remarkable time. We were being strangled by a once-in-a-century pandemic, and a morally busted incumbent who saw good people at KKK rallies, allies in dictators like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un, and ingesting Lysol as a cure for what was literally killing us under his watch.

Joe Biden and a majority of America defeated all that. It was an election to be savored and celebrated safely and appropriately, because there were still people dying by the hundreds and thousands each day.


Mostly, it was time to finally move on to better days …

We know now that was never allowed to happen. We know now the worst was actually yet to come from the dumpster-diver, and the reprehensible, anti-American filth who faithfully followed him into the swirl of his toilet, where he always did his most odious, anti-American work.

First, Trump refused to concede to Biden, which wasn't a total surprise. After all, he had never been a gracious man for even a minute. He was a spoiled brat — just another rich kid born with a silver spoon stuck up his endless, fat ass.

He was a notorious liar and cheater, who actually superimposed his ugly, orange face onto magazine covers, and taped them to the walls of the locker rooms of the golf clubs he harrumphed around in to impress people.


And how absolutely pathetic is that?

With each passing day following the election blowout, his nuclear-powered temper tantrums got worse. He got sicker and meaner. He lashed out and threatened election workers. He shook down campaign officials to find him votes.

He began relentlessly telling the Big Lie — that the election had somehow been stolen from him, and him alone. Forget the fact that Republicans had fared surprisingly well all over the map in the Congressional races that year, actually cutting significantly into the Democrats’ advantage in the House.

No, according to Trump and the leeches who sucked onto him, his election had somehow been singularly stolen.


This, of course, was complete hogwash, but the fact that everybody in his miserable political party had done better than he had was impossible for a revolting narcissist to process.

He was THE Big Loser. Yuge.

Still he pressed ahead, and used the proximity of the most powerful office in the world to pucker up, blow hard, and trumpet the Big Lie that he won an election he provably lost by more than seven millions votes.

He grabbed party members by the scruff of their chicken necks, and warned them to get on board with his latest evil scheme. In his best whiny, thug voice he said he was going to ignore the results of the election, see, and they were going to help him, see ...


Slowly the Big Lie starting gaining noxious steam among the terrible cowards in his revolting party, who suddenly couldn’t wait to blow Trump’s sweaty horn.

Convincing his supporters was far easier. They were standing by, ready to take orders. After all, they had long ago lowered themselves into the sewer, and were eagerly awaiting his next command, as they batted away the flies that buzzed around their empty heads.

All that led to the attack on January 6, 2021.

The day Joe Biden would officially become president … they day the people who truly love America were to finally have their long-awaited celebration … is now remembered as one of the saddest episodes in American history thanks to the traitor, Donald Trump, and the disgusting, anti-American sore losers who support him.

Trump still has not been punished for his failed coup attempt, and the damage he imposed on this country. Because of that, his attack continues. Citizens who love this country and stood up for her, have been abandoned by our Justice Department, which has failed us spectacularly by its gross inability to perform its most important job: keeping us safe from our enemies.

Our corporate media has been a complete and utter joke, and somehow still can’t come to grips with the fact that their freedoms are hanging by thread. I truly can’t stand the people who are staffing these newsrooms, and have no idea how to handle the biggest story in American history.

I don’t recognize the business, where I spent three decades of my life. They are damned, incompetent fools, all of them …

On the morning after Trump held yet another one of his unhinged, overhyped, dog-whistle rallies, where he praised Hannibal Lecter, confused tennis player Jimmy Connors with Jimmy Carter, called myriad people “fat pigs,” induced the tongue-draggers in his audience to hurl vulgarities at Democrats, and once again told the Big Lie over, and over, and over again, The Washington Post went out with this headline for their lead story in Sunday’s editions:

False claims …

FALSE CLAIMS????????

My God …

After everything I typed above … after all the damage Trump and his revolting party have done to this country … our corporate media STILL can’t (or simply won’t) type the word “LIE.”

The Big Lie is the most grievous piece of dangerous propaganda ever unfurled across our country, and it simply must be strenuously called out for what it most certainly is in our independent press.

Its aim is to end us and our Democracy. If it is allowed to further fester, it will irreparably damage the mechanism by which American citizens have been choosing their leaders for centuries.

We will descend into mob rule and chaos.

Already, many Republicans are refusing to commit to honoring the results of November’s election if they don’t get the results they want. They are telling us that they will not accept losing ever again. They are telling us they will do everything they can to steal power that they have absolutely no right to.

They have stacked our Supreme Court in their favor with a deadly purpose and intention. They most certainly mean us harm.

We have never been here before in American history. One major party honors our elections, the other party loathes them.

The very least our corporate media can do right now is sound the alarms loudly and repeatedly, and call a damn lie, a damn lie when they hear one.

The fact is, the truth is the only thing left that will truly set us free.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. Follow @EarlofEnough and on his website.

Thom Hartmann: How 'billionaire oligarchs' are pushing America to 'fascism' and 'civil war'

Members of the Proud Boys in Cleveland in 2020 (Creative Commons)

Alex Henderson

ALTERNET

May 17, 2024


The U.S. Supreme Court suffered yet another controversy following a bombshell report published by the New York Times on May 16.

According to Times reporter Jodi Kantor, an upside-down flag was hanging outside Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito's home in Alexandria, Virginia on January 17, 2021 — which was only 11 days after a mob of Donald Trump supporters violently attacked the U.S. Capitol Building. At the time, an inverted flag was a symbol of the "Stop the Steal" movement and MAGA efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.

Alito told the Times, "I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag. It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor's use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs."

READ MORE:'Trump is threatening violence on Americans': Internet pounces on ex-president's new video

But Alito critics are taking no comfort in that statement.

Progressive journalist/author Thom Hartmann, in a sobering article published by The New Republic on May 17, views the presence of that flag outside Alito's home as a symptom of a large problem: "billionaire oligarchs" who are pushing the United States to "fascism" and "civil war."

Hartmann writes, "The headline in this week's Fortune reads: Billionaire investor Ray Dalio warns U.S. is 'on the brink' and estimates a more than 1 in 3 chance of civil war. Billionaires and civil war? A billionaire-funded Supreme Court justice flew the American flag upside down outside his house after January 6 in apparent support of Donald Trump's attempt to overthrow our government."

The journalist/author warns that billionaires are making generous contributions to the MAGA movement and Trump's 2024 presidential campaign during a time of "political violence."

READ MORE: 'Partisan insurrectionist': Calls mount for Alito's ouster after 'Stop the Steal' scandal

"For a second time in American history," Hartmann explains, "we're confronted with a near-complete takeover of about half of our nation by America's oligarchs. And with it has come not just the threat of political violence, but the reality, from the death of Heather Heyer to the George Floyd protests to January 6th and the assault on Paul Pelosi. All driven by oligarchs determined to pit us against each other so we won't recognize how they're robbing us blind."

According to Hartmann, history shows that "oligarchies" and political unrest often go hand in hand.

"Oligarchies are inherently unstable forms of government because they transfer resources and power from working people to the oligarchs," Hartmann warns. "Average people, seeing that they're constantly falling behind and can't do anything about it, first become cynical and disengage — and, when things get bad enough, they try to revolt. That 'revolution' can either lead to the oligarchy failing and the nation flipping back to democracy, as happened here in the 1860s and the 1930s. Or it can flip into full-blown strongman tyranny, as happened recently in Hungary, Turkey, and Russia, and nearly happened here on January 6."

Hartmann continues, "To the end of cementing their own oligarchy here, the billionaires who own the GOP are now actively promoting the same sort of revisionist history the Confederacy did, claiming that the Founders were all rich guys who hated taxes, wanted rich men to rule America, and wrote the Constitution to make that happen."


Thom Hartmann's full article for The New Republic is available at this link.

ROBERT REICH

America’s second civil war? It’s already begun

Members of far-right groups marching in Charlottesville, Virginia 

, Wikimedia Commons

Robert Reich

May 13, 2024

Despite the popularity of the recent movie “Civil War,” we’re not on the verge of a second one. But we are separating into so-called “red” and “blue.” And if Trump is reelected president, he’ll hasten the separation.

Since the Supreme Court’s decision to reverse Roe v. Wade left the issue of abortion to the states, one out of three women of childbearing age now lives in a state that makes it nearly impossible to get an abortion.

And while red states are making it harder than ever to get abortions, they’re making it easier than ever to buy guns.

Red states are also banning diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in education. Florida’s Board of Education recently prohibited public colleges from using state and federal funds for DEI. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has signed a law to require that all state-funded colleges and universities close their DEI offices.

Red states are suppressing votes. In Florida and Texas, teams of “election police” have been created to crack down on the rare crime of voter fraud, another fallout from Trump’s big lie.

They’re banning the teaching of America’s history of racism. They’re requiring transgender students to use bathrooms and join sports teams that reflect their sex at birth.

They’re making it harder to protest. More difficult to qualify for unemployment benefits and other forms of public assistance. Harder than ever to form labor unions.

They’re even passing “bounty” laws — enforced not by governments but by rewards to private citizens for filing lawsuits — on issues ranging from classroom speech to abortion to vaccination.

Blue states are moving in the opposite direction. Several, including Colorado and Vermont, are codifying a right to abortion. Some are helping cover abortion expenses for out-of-staters.

When Idaho proposed a ban on abortion that empowers relatives to sue anyone who helps terminate a pregnancy after six weeks, nearby Oregon approved $15 million to help cover the abortion expenses of patients from other states.

Maryland and Washington have expanded access and legal protections to out-of-state abortion patients. California has expanded access to abortion and protected abortion providers from out-of-state legal action.


After the governor of Texas ordered state agencies to investigate parents for child abuse if they provide certain medical treatments to their transgender children, California enacted a law making the state a refuge for transgender youths and their families.

Blue states are also coordinating more of their policies. During the pandemic, blue states joined together on policies that red states rejected — such as purchasing agreements for personal protective equipment, strategies for reopening businesses as Covid subsided, even on travel from other states with high levels of Covid.

But as blue and red states separate, what will happen to the poor in red states, disproportionately people of color?

“States’ rights” has always been a cover for racial discrimination and segregation. The poor — both white and people of color — are already especially burdened by anti-abortion legislation because they can’t afford travel to a blue state to get an abortion.

They’re also hurt by the failure of red states to expand Medicaid eligibility under the Affordable Care Act, by red state de facto segregation in public schools, and by red state measures to suppress votes.

One answer is for Democratic administrations and congresses in Washington to prioritize the needs of the red state poor and make extra efforts to protect the civil and political rights of people of color in red states. Yet the failure of the Senate to muster enough votes to pass the Freedom to Vote Act, let alone revive the Voting Rights Act, suggests how difficult this will be.

Blue states could spend additional resources on the needs of red state residents, such as Oregon is now doing for people from outside Oregon who seek abortions. And prohibit state funds from being spent in any state that bans abortions or discriminates on the basis of race, ethnicity, or gender.

California already bars anyone on a state payroll (including yours truly, who teaches at Berkeley) from getting reimbursed for travel to states that discriminate against LGBTQ+ people.

Where will all this end?

If Trump is elected this November, the separation will become even sharper. When he was president last time, Trump acted as if he was president only of the people who vote for him — overwhelmingly from red states — and not as the president of all of America.

Recall that during his presidency, he supported legislation that hurt voters in blue states — such as his tax law that stopped deductions of state and local taxes from federal income taxes.

More than 4 in 10 voters believe that a second civil war is likely within the next five years, according to a Rasmussen Reports poll conducted April 21-23.

Red zip codes are getting redder and blue zip codes, bluer. Of the nation’s total 3,143 counties, the number of super landslide counties — where a presidential candidate won at least 80 percent of the vote — jumped from 6 percent in 2004 to 22 percent in 2020.

Surveys show Americans find it increasingly important to live around people who share their political values. Animosity toward those in the opposing party is higher than at any time in living memory. Forty-two percent of registered voters believe Americans in the other party are “downright evil.”

Almost 40 percent would be upset at the prospect of their child marrying someone from the opposite party. Even before the 2020 election, when asked if violence would be justified if the other party won the election, 18.3 percent of Democrats and 13.8 percent of Republicans responded in the affirmative.

We are becoming two Americas — one largely urban, racially and ethnically diverse, and young. The other, largely rural or exurban, white and older.

But rather than civil war, I see a gradual, continuous separation — analogous to unhappily married people who don’t want to go through the trauma of a formal divorce.

America will still be America. But it is fast becoming two versions of America. The open question is the same as faced by couples who separate: Will the two remain civil toward each other?

There's something important about Trump’s trial in NY that’s not being openly talked about

Courtroom illustration depicting former President Donald Trump watching Michael Cohen's testimony

Robert Reich

May 16, 2024

There is something important about Trump’s criminal trial in New York that’s not being openly talked about. I don’t mean we’re not getting the facts about what’s happening in Manhattan Superior Court. But something very big is being left out.

The trial has introduced us to a world of moral and ethical loathsomeness in which people use and abuse one another routinely. It’s Trump world.

Consider Stormy Daniels. Porn stars are entitled to do as they wish to make money. But when they extort their clients or boyfriends who are running for public office — demanding large payments in order to stay quiet about their affair — they’re violating public morality. They’re contributing to a society in which every interaction has a potential price.

Last week we heard Daniels’s story, even more detailed and lascivious than expected. But a troubling aspect of her behavior is that when Trump ran for office, she saw a chance to extort money from him. She then “shopped” her account of their sexual liaison, before finally accepting $130,000 to be silenced in the 2016 election’s final critical days.

Or consider Michael Cohen. Powerful people often need “fixers” — assistants that carry out their wishes and protect them from legal or political trouble. But when those fixers arrange payments to keep stories out of the media, they’re treading on morally thin ice.

Cohen didn’t just fix. He boasted of burying Trump’s secrets and spreading Trump’s lies. In his work for Trump, he repeatedly acted illegally and found ways to cover up his actions. After he paid Daniels to keep silent and Trump was elected president, Cohen concocted with Trump a means of being reimbursed that involved falsifying records that disguised the repayment as ordinary legal expenses.

And then there’s David Pecker, publisher of the National Enquirer. Tabloids are part of a long tradition of American journalism. But when tabloid publishers buy stories to bury them on behalf of powerful people, thereby establishing a kind of bankable account of chits that can be cashed in with the powerful, it violates public morality because it corrupts our democracy.

Two weeks ago, Pecker testified about “catching and killing” stories — buying the exclusive rights to stories, or “catching them,” for the specific goal of ensuring the information never becomes public. That’s the “killing” part. According to people who have worked for him, Pecker mastered this technique — ethics be damned.

Which brings us to Trump himself. I don’t care that he had extramarital affairs. But when a presidential candidate tells his fixer to buy off someone — “Just take care of it” — so the public doesn’t get information before an election about a candidate that they might find relevant to evaluating him, it undermines democracy.

This cast of characters — and there are many, many others like them in Trump world — are loathsome not just because they have violated the law, but because they have contributed to creating a harsh society in which everyone is potentially bought or sold.

It’s a sell-or-tell society, a catch-and-kill society, a just-take-care-of-it society. A society where money and power are the only considerations. Where honor and integrity count for nothing.

I am not naive about how the world works. I’ve spent years in Washington, many of them around powerful people. I have seen the seamy side of American politics and business.

But the people who inhabit Trump world live in a more extreme place — where there are no norms, no standards of decency, no common good. There are only opportunities to make money off others and potential dangers of being ripped off by others.

It’s a place where there are no relationships, only transactions.

I sometimes worry that the daily dismal drone of Trump world — the continuous lies and vindictiveness that issue from Trump and his campaign, the dismissive and derogatory ways he deals with and talks about others, the people who testify at his criminal trial about what they have done for or to him and what he has done for or to them — have a subtly corrosive effect on our own world.

It’s important to remind ourselves that most of the people we know are not like this. That honor and integrity do count. That standards of decency guide most behavior. That relationships matter.

Robert Reich is a professor at Berkeley and was secretary of labor under Bill Clinton. You can find his writing at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

Bloomberg editorial: Trump’s 'puzzling economic agenda' will make inflation even worse

Former President Donald Trump in Tampa, Florida in July 2022 (Gage Skidmore)

Alex Henderson

May 15, 2024

ALTERNET


While facing four criminal indictments, presumptive 2024 GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump has been aggressively campaigning on the economy — especially inflation, which he is blaming incumbent President Joe Biden for. And that messaging may be working: some polls released in May have found Trump with narrow single-digit leads, while others show Biden slightly ahead.

Recent polls in swing states, especially those in the Sun Belt, are showing Trump with an advantage.

But in an editorial published on May 14, Bloomberg News' editorial board warns that Trump's proposals would be terrible for the U.S. economy if he returns to the White House in January 2025.

READ MORE:'Econ 101': Here’s what Trump gets painfully wrong about inflation

"Whoever wins November's election," Bloomberg's editorial board argues, "inflation will present them with an immediate challenge…. It's a bit puzzling, then, that former President Donald Trump's economic agenda seems to be dedicated to raising prices."

Trump's proposals, the editorial board notes, include "tariffs of 60 percent on Chinese-made products and 10 percent on other imports" as well as "devaluing" the U.S. dollar. And Trump has toyed with the idea of a hands-on policy with the U.S. Federal Reserve.

All of this, according to the editorial, is a recipe for increasing "the cost of imported goods and inputs for domestic producers."

"Some caveats are in order," Bloomberg's editorial board explains. "Trump doesn’t always mean what he says…. But what do you get, all else equal, when you add much higher tariffs, a politicized central bank, a deliberately weakened currency and an enormous surge in public borrowing, at a time of already-elevated inflation? It would be best to not find out."

READ MORE: 'Disastrous consequences': Columnist warns this 'destructive' Trump plan could tank economy

High interest rates aren’t going away anytime soon – a business economist explains why

The Conversation

May 03, 2024

The Federal Reserve held interest rates steady at its May 1, 2024, policy meeting, dashing the hopes of potential homebuyers and others who were hoping for a cut. Not only will rates remain at their current level – a 23-year high – for at least another month, there’s little reason to believe the Fed will start tapering until the fall. Indeed, if inflation starts to heat back up, it’s plausible — though at the moment unlikely — that the Fed will consider ratcheting up rates another 25 basis points or so in the coming months.

As recently as a few months ago, investors were betting that 2024 would bring a slew of rate cuts.

But speaking as a business economist, I think it’s clear that the latest economic data discouraged the Fed from easing up as it gathered for its latest policy meeting. There’s no sign of an imminent recession. Employment is still pretty strong, with the U.S. adding 303,000 jobs in March 2024 and 270,000 in February, and the unemployment rate – at 3.8% in March – ticked up only slightly from 3.5% in March 2023. That is simply not a large enough increase to be concerned that high rates are slowing the economy down too abruptly.

While it’s true that inflation-adjusted gross domestic product growth, after posting a remarkable 4.8% annualized increase in the fourth quarter of 2023, slowed significantly to 1.6% in the first quarter of 2024, slower growth is exactly what the Fed has been attempting to engineer by raising interest rates. By controlling demand for good and services, price growth slows. That’s still not a recessionary indication.
The inflation challenge

Getting inflation rates down to the Fed’s 2% target — a number that Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell repeated several times during his news conference — has been challenging, to say the least. The Fed began hiking interest rates in early 2022. Initially, it had some success in reducing inflation that had peaked at about 9% that year. Indeed, as Powell said, the reduction in inflation was historically fast, due in part to both rate increases and easing international supply chain disruptions. But since June 2023, when inflation was 3.1%, there’s been little decline. Indeed, consumer price index growth hasn’t fallen below 3% since March 2021.

One of the main reasons inflation has stayed high is that there aren’t enough workers. Economic growth increases labor demand, and labor supply simply hasn’t kept pace. The result is higher wages. With higher wages, firms need to cut costs elsewhere, increase prices, or both, to maintain profitability.

Another important driver of inflation, which Powell took pains to mention, is the rising cost of rent. With higher mortgage rates, the housing market has slowed considerably, and many Americans — especially younger ones — are renting instead of buying. Sustained demand for apartments, combined with increased costs of maintenance and upkeep of rental properties, is pressuring rents upward.
Could hikes be in the future?

The next rate decision, in June, is “unlikely” to bring an increase, Powell said during his news conference. He also indicated said the current regime of high rates should be sufficient to tame inflation.

Indeed, as he noted, new job openings have fallen from a peak of 12.1 million in March 2022 to 8.4 million in March 2024. While that’s still high in absolute terms, it’s a significant decline, which suggests slower labor demand. This should then reduce pressure on wages.

So, what about rate cuts? After all, some observers were expecting rate cuts to begin this summer. Based on the information I’m looking at, that is simply not going to happen. No move will occur until September at the earliest. Until then, expect a sluggish housing market and costly borrowing, but moderating inflation and slow but steady growth.

Christopher Decker, Professor of Economics, University of Nebraska Omaha

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.