SOLOMON HUGHES highlights a 1995 Sunday Times story about the disappearance of ‘defecting Iraqi nuclear scientist.’ Even though the story was debunked, it was widely repeated across the mainstream press, creating the false – and deadly – narrative of Iraqi WMD that eventually led to war
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Inflation: refusing to pay for it
In the past, the Western ruling class has sought to manage inflation by ensuring that rising prices are not matched by growing salaries — but the global environment and domestic resistance from the organised working class are making this difficult, writes PRABHAT PATNAIK
The fact that inflation is sought to be controlled by squeezing the share of the working class does not mean that the working class was responsible for starting the inflationary process. In fact, the two phenomena have nothing to do with one another.
RUBY ALDEN GIBSON believes Scottish parliament has enough powers to curtail Westminster Labour’s savage attack on welfare
KEVIN DONNELLY reports from Monte Faudo and its annual remembrance of the region’s WWII partisan anti-fascist battles
The Trump government is seizing overseas students from their homes and campuses and even off the streets, with no legal grounds and no due process, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
As global fascism grows, ROGER McKENZIE urges the left to reclaim May Day’s revolutionary roots — not as an act of nostalgia, but as fuel for building a ‘community of resistance’ against exploitation and the rise of fascism
Our unions need to make a firm stand against so-called ‘defence spending’: the boss class say there’s no magic money tree — and there should be no magic mushroom cloud either, argues NATHAN HENNEBRY
KEITH FLETT revisits the 1978 origins of Britain’s May Day bank holiday — from Michael Foot’s triumph to Thatcher’s reluctant acceptance — as Starmer’s government dodges calls to expand our working-class celebrations
ECONOMISTS distinguish between two kinds of inflation: “demand-pull” and “cost-push.” Demand-pull inflation is said to occur when there is excess demand in a situation where supply cannot be augmented, because full capacity output has been reached in one or more crucial sectors. Wartime inflation is a classic example.
In India during the pre-neoliberal, dirigiste period, inflation was often the result of an insufficient grain output relative to demand, arising from a poor harvest.
Cost-push inflation on the other hand occurs when supplies can be augmented, as the economy is nowhere near full capacity in key sectors, but one of the classes tries to raise its share of output, by demanding a higher price for the input it provides, while other classes are unwilling to lower their shares, giving rise to a tug-of-war, which manifests itself through inflation.
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