Following the US-Israeli strikes on Iran, gas prices, grocery bills and mortgage rates have all climbed
The US-Israel war against Iran has sent shockwaves through global markets, leaving many Americans grappling with a growing financial squeeze on everyday living costs.
Following the US-Israeli strikes on Iran – prompting retaliatory attacks on US allies in the region and Iran’s decision to close the Strait of Hormuz, a critical maritime passage – costs have surged across the US. Gas prices, in particular, have spiked sharply, with the national average rising by roughly 30% over the past month. Grocery bills, mortgage rates and fertilizer costs have also climbed.
Now, many Americans are being forced to reassess their finances and cut back drastically on basic necessities such as food, clothing and electricity.
Americans look around at all the cheap commodities around them and think “yes, capitalism is the best system for organizing an economy”. What they don’t realize is just how much this lifestyle has been the direct result of exploitation of workers and resources in the global south, destruction of the environment, consuming at a level ~5x what the earth can sustain, not to mention US dollar hegemony and a military with 800+ bases around the world that can impose the will of capital (which realizes cheap stuff is needed to pay off the working class in the global north. When capital is no longer able to maintain this, I genuine believe workers will question this whole “capitalism is the best system ever” thing.
Not just America: it’s pretty much the same in all those countries with economies were Services are a 70%+ proportion.
If most of the Economy isn’t actually creating health but rather in being an intermediary between producers and users (sales, distribution), distracting people (social media, TV, a lot of the Press), slight efficiency improvements, capital usage tweaks or even just bypassing inefficiencies in the actual economic system (most services sold to businesses, outsourcing) and extracting rents from merelly holding wealth or resources which can’t be reproduced (realestate, finance), the production of real value which allows people in such economies of “sitting in the middle and take a cut” to survive must come from somewhere else.
So at least most of Europe as well as Japan have the same disfunctional economic structure as the US and people there are also self-deluded in thinking that higher stock or house prices is a wealthier economy, though maybe not quite as thoroughly deluded as in the US.