Barely a week goes by without some boss complaining about the "high cost" of employing workers. Apparently we have too many rights, too, preventing the economy from growing!

    This week, it was "Lord" Wolfson, the boss of clothing retailer Next, who told the government it should reverse the rise in employers' national insurance contributions, and reverse the minimum wage rises!

    Each of these rich bosses - Wolfson will earn £7 million this year - claims to be a "victim" of government policy. According to them, the government has made it far too expensive to employ workers. For instance Next has been "forced" to use "self-scanning lockers for customers to return items instead of having staff on tills". Nothing to do, of course, with helping their profits rise to £1.2bn this year!

    In fact all these bosses are very pleased to be able to blame the government for making them do exactly what they have always done! That is, cut jobs, cut wages and conditions and employ workers on worse and worse contracts.

    By now, overall (official) unemployment has risen to 5%, from just over 4% this time last year, while for 16 to 24-year-olds it's 16.2%, the highest since 2014! And these figures ignore the more than 9 million people who are "economically inactive".

    As the cost of living has been skyrocketing for the past b years, while wages haven't, it's obvious that workers have less to spend. Businesses, rather than taking a cut in profits, cut jobs instead. So the retail economy takes a hit...

    When Rachel Reeves suggested voluntary price caps for staple foods last week, the M&S boss said this was "preposterous!™. She immediately backed down! Instead, she'll now cut tariffs on certain food imports and announced a "Great British Summer Savings" program to cut VAT on children's tickets for transport and entertainment in August. A drop in the ocean and almost certainly eaten up by the rise in the energy price cap in July, expected to be an average of £200...

    Never mind, though, all these bosses and CEOs want to portray themselves as the real victims of this cost of living crisis! Next's profits of £1.2bn are hardly shabby! But Shell and BP profits - in just the first three months of this year - were already in the billions. Between January and March, BP doubled its profits to £2.4bn, and Shell was up to £5.1bn!

    The share of the national wealth going to workers is falling drastically, while more and more cash ends up in the hands of the richest capitalists and their companies. The working class will have to force them to turn out their pockets!

Tuesday's strikes on Iran "only" targeted some missile-launchers near the Strait of Hormuz and a nearby naval port, as well as the small craft which the Iranians use to police the Strait.

    Trump says this was part of his operation to re-open the Strait and not the relaunch of a full-blown war... And in the meanwhile, negotiations to concoct some kind of deal, continue. No doubt when Trump visited China, he was told by President Xi Jinping that a peace agreement was a very good idea.

    Nevertheless, the fate of ordinary Iranians still hangs in the balance. And while it dangles precariously, Netanyahu is continuing his relentless and vicious assault on Lebanon's civilians and keeps coming back to "finish the job" in Gaza, with Trump's support.

    Netanyahu's strategy of deliberately targeting civilians in order to turn them against their former protector-militias - whether Hamas or Hezbollah - fools nobody. Anyway, the civilian supporters of these groups know very well that Netanyahu's policy is a policy to annihilate as many civilians as possible. And never mind that this is just as impossible an aim, as it always has been. But madness comes in two shapes in the world today: those of Donald J Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu.

    The question now is what next for Iran? Trump has just come up with a new "condition" for the Iranians to agree to. He wants them to adopt his so-called Abraham Accords, which entail recognising Israel as a legitimate state! It's a foregone conclusion that the Iranians will refuse. So one has to wonder if this means that Trump has now decided - or been egged-on by Netanyahu - to relaunch a full-blown attack on Iran.

    For sure, neutralising Iran into the future, for Israel's sake, was also the idea behind bombing Iran last June and destroying its nuclear facilities. But so far, they've failed to achieve regime-change.

    If Trump now goes back to finish the job, the consequences for the rest of the region, the Gulf States and beyond - let alone the economies of the rest of the world {including the US) - will be even more damaging than they already are.

    Does Trump dare? He certainly doesn't care! In that, he's the epitome of this stinking and rotten capitalist system which can only offer war and destruction into the future. They both have to go.