The global economic crisis is upon us, and no amount of sugar-coating by traditional economists, money-managers, and finance ministers can obfuscate the miserable reality the world is at present. The developed economies from the G7 countries of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States are on the precipice or already in the middle of stagflation, while China is experiencing a profound economic slowdown, and developing and least-develop nations are bogged down in debt and destitution. The global economy has not yet recovered from the devastation brought about by the global financial crisis in 2008, then came the COVID-19 pandemic and the ruin it brought to the economies of all countries, most especially devastated were the economies from the Global South.
Rising global temperatures are causing natural disasters, weather extremes, drought, food, and water insecurity, along with rising sea levels, ice caps, and glacier melts, coral reef destruction, and together posing a massive threat to flora and fauna, and to peoples on a worldwide scale.
The job and climate crisis have been experienced by the working people for many years now, even before the COVID19 pandemic in 2020. Real incomes have continued to fall in the past four decades, while the dislocation of rural people due to the climate crisis have continued, with millions losing their lives and livelihood. The COVID19 pandemic have placed the burden of massive, debilitating debt on many countries of the global South, where governments have chosen the Neoliberal policy of debt payments over funding for basic social service, including health care and social protection.
The Russia-Ukraine war have added pressure to rising spikes in the price of grain, fertilizer, gas, coal, and oil, causing a steep increase in prices of goods and hunger in Africa, in particular, and at the same time super war profits to the corporations supplying the war materiel.
These shocks to the lives of working people are happening while the transnational corporations and the global elite are making a killing. Economic, climate, health, and war crises are opportune times for the biggest Trans National Corporations (TNCs) to swallow smaller firms and increase their monopoly, expand their markets, and accumulate ever-increasing amount of profits. The concentration of wealth in the hands of a few is scandalous, with fortunes of billionaires increasing by $2.7bn/day, while big transnational corporation in food and energy doubled their recorded profits last year, according to Oxfam International.
In chorus, the Monetarists and Neoliberals now blame the workers’ wages for the inflation spike. They immediately moved to depress wages, supposedly to tame inflation. As expected, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) now say that “observers warn that prices and wages could start feeding off each other, with wage and price inflation ratcheting up in a sustained wage-price spiral.”
The TNCs and the global elite refused to cut down on their carbon emissions, promoted carbon offset schemes to deflect the blame on their CO2 emissions, while making a profit at the same time, and refused to accept accountability for the climate crisis we are in. The TNCs continue to rampage across rural lands to plunder every ounce of natural resources, including expanding their exploration of the seas and oceans as new areas for plunder and exploitation.
The current capitalist system is rigged to favor the TNCs and the global elite. As the G7 countries prepare to meet in May 2023, we can expect regurgitated slogans of the need for more “free trade” and proposals favoring TNCs and the global elite; carbon targets but no real action to hoodwink the people, and hide their responsibility for the climate crisis.
We need system change, where the new system allows resources to be democratically controlled by the people and made to serve the needs of the people and the planet. But the current imperial rule of TNCs and the global elite hinder the working people from taking control of the resources for our mutual benefit, and instead the TNCs and the global elite exert all efforts to prevent democratic rule, ensuring all gains are concentrated between them. All kinds of machinations are used, with the collaboration of the local elite of various States, among them armed suppression of dissenting peoples, enabling the hegemony of the TNCs and the global elite over our economic, political, and social lives.
Right now, we can only reach that goal if working people come together and break the barriers created by the TNCs and global elites to divide and conquer us. We must create solidarity bridges between all working people, especially the working people from the global south. We must tackle all concerns and promote the welfare of the working people, in every inch of our communities, in every corner of the world, from the local to the global.#
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