Hey there everyone—
Today I decided to share some information I gathered this week—much of it in very mainstream places—on the impact of inflation on ordinary people and the ways corporations are trying to use “inflation” as a way to continue to increase their prices and maintain their profits, even as inflation is said to be going down.
I’m going to summarize this information because I think it’s a perfect representation of the ways late stage capitalism is bumping up against limits and fighting with everything its got to extract the last possible bits of money, time, attention, resources and profit from an ever-shrinking source.
My wish is that we would all look at this information, this ordinary reporting from an ordinary week, and say: this was the moment when it was absolutely fundamentally clear that there is no farther for late stage capitalism to go. That the collective psychosis of believing we can continue to consume and thrive; that the working class and the poor and the starving will find a way to continue to scrounge and work hard and get by; that the growth mindset will save us all—this was the point where its own absurdity reached such heights than even its purveyors could no longer believe it. This was the point where the constant exposure to the suffering of humans and the more than human world hit its own emotional wall.
Premiumization
What it is:
A strategy to allow companies to continue to charge the prices they have been charging at the height of inflation, even as inflation “cools” and prices are supposed to go down. Or, as the authors note: “It could be a sign that companies are making last-ditch efforts to justify higher prices and cling to fat profits as the economic outlook darkens.” In the last three weeks, the word “premiumization” was mentioned sixty times in investor calls as a strategy that will allow corporations to continue to ensure that their investors will profit from stock market returns.
Credit Card Points
What it is:
Middle and upper class people are increasingly inclined to use credit cards that have “rewards” or “points” programs. If you have a card with a rewards program and you gather enough points, you can get discounts at fancy restaurants or hotels, free airline tickets, and reduced costs on products and services.
The Current Impacts of Inflation
The U.S. Census Bureau, since April of 2020, has been regularly collecting data on households to determine the impact of the pandemic. It has continued to conduct these surveys, and is now mapping the impact of inflation. Their most recent survey was conducted from Feb 1st through the 13th, 2023. It found:
* 25 million people do not have enough money to buy adequate amounts of food.
* 40 million people are struggling to pay for their household expenses.
* 16% of the people who were surveyed said it was “likely” they would be evicted from their homes in the next two months, and 23.7% said is was “somewhat likely” they would be evicted.
* Between January 14, 2023 and February 14, 2023 the price of eggs went up 8.5%.
* On March 1, 2023 the increase in SNAP benefits that was granted during the pandemic expired, leading to an average loss of $90 per month for beneficiaries.
* Because unemployment benefits from the pandemic are also expiring, people are no longer able to rely on unemployment money to buy food.
* The lack of medicaid expansion in many Southern states means that the number of people suffering from of economic distress, food and housing scarcity is highest in the South.
What’s clear is that an ever-increasing number of people in the United States are suffering. They cannot meet their basic needs. They lack universal healthcare and childcare. The prices of food and services are high, and going up, week by week.
The population is confronting the very real facts of limits: the limits of our economy; the limits of the human body to work so hard without sustenance or healthcare; the limits of the planet’s resources, like healthy soil, minerals, and wood; the limits of the amount of luxury even rich people can consume; the limits of the environment to suck up our pollution and the earth to absorb our toxic chemicals; the limits of how much streaming content we can watch; the limits of how much longer people can buy into the idea that material things are adequate proxies for love, and meaning, and communion with one another, with spirit, with whatever your version is of what binds together the more than human world, and all of us, into a whole.
The white middle class has been encouraged to believe in the fiction of independence. They have been encouraged to meet their needs themselves, or inside their families, and if they can’t do that, to hire people to meet their needs—to spend money on goods and services. Other communities have relied on interdependence, on mutual aid, on sharing economies, on tool libraries, on showing up in a crisis and devising creative strategies to solve problems.
As the access to money and resources continues to be pushed higher and higher up the chain, with greater numbers of people suffering from poverty and economic distress, I wonder what the middle class will do in response? I wonder about all the people who are already engaged in social change work, in the Just Transition, in efforts to dream a new way of being that depends on reciprocity and staying within our planetary limits. I wonder what percentage of the people in the United States are longing for a completely different way of living, and think they’re alone in that desire, and aren’t sure how to get there.
