Inside: To fight inflation, fight monopolies; How noncompetes shackle workers to dead-end jobs; Agricultural right to repair law is a no-brainer; and more!
John Deere was once an American icon, beloved by workers for good wages and job security, and by farmers, who co-innovated new agricultural techniques and technologies. Today, it's a case-study in the horrors of finance capitalism. 1/
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Today, the company is rotten to the core. Despite skyrocketing profits, the company has continued to grind down its workers, sparking a strike by all 10,000 of its workers. 3/
You've heard about the #GreatResignation, the legions of American workers who have reached a breaking point with their abusive, underpaid jobs and jumped ship. 1/
It's a remarkable, spontaneous, uncoordinated uprising that sees Alice quitting her job and Bob quitting his, and then Alice getting Bob's old job at a better wage, and Bob getting Alice's old job at a better wage, too. 2/
After 40 years of wage stagnation, workers are finally starting to claim back some of the share of the profits that had been diverted from people who do things to people who own things.
But as great as the Great Resignation is, it could be greater. 3/
The majority of the public blames #inflation on price-gouging. That's not surprising, because the CEOs of monopolistic companies keep boasting about their record profits even as they raise prices. 1/
If a company raises prices *and* margins, then we don't have an "inflation" problem, we have a price-fixing problem.
And yet, the majority of *economists* insist that this is impossible. 2/
They hew to the Reagan-era doctrine that says that inflation is always the result of giving poor people too much money, which leads to the "wage-price spiral." The answer is to hike interest rates, cut "generous" benefits and take away labor rights. 3/