crumbsroom wrote:

Why do democrats so consistently not take charge of the conversation about who actually might sorta care about the working class?

How does the right suck up so much of the credit for economies that benefit everyone, and not just the rich?

It shouldn't be hard. It shouldn't be fucking hard. Unless there are benefits in the messengers never giving the left a lick of credit.

But of course not, because all these multi billion dollar news corporations are clearly a lock on promoting liberal cocksucker values and socialism. That good old left wing bias that is turning everyone of us into pinko turnips.
 

Well, we're seeing some of the reason for why it is so fucking hard.  Because the "liberal media" punishes Democrats who try to push policies to help the the average person at the expense of the rich.  Kamala Harris released her economic platform on Friday, focusing on inflation, housing and expanding the middle-class-oriented child tax credit and earned income tax credits.  In response, the Washington Post published at least three op-eds attacking Harris (all of which must have been written from a preview transcript prior to her speech), calling her policies "communist" and "populist gimmicks".  This is because the Washington Post is ultimately pro-business and is still owned by the guy who annually earns billions of dollars from Amazon.  Despite that, this will provide Republicans, and the downstream mainstream media, to characterize Harris as being even too socialist for the "far-left" WaPo.

Out of these op-eds, let's look at the one that's really getting traction, and note the very many...let's call them presumptions rather than lies.  First note how nobody wanted to actually put their name on this, being vaguely credited to the "Editorial Board", feigning consensus.  They have a strange suggestion for how Harris should address inflation: "One way to handle it might be to level with voters, telling them that inflation spiked in 2021 mainly because the pandemic snarled supply chains, and that the Federal Reserve’s policies, which the Biden-Harris administration supported, are working to slow it."  In other words, they're suggesting that Harris does nothing at all except to let the corporate profiteers off the hook.  But as for that second point, have the Fed's interest rate hikes slowed inflation?  It's doubtful, but optimistically it's at least debatable, but either way it doesn't appear to be solid enough to sell whole-heartedly to your voters.  And for the former point, if we can so easily place the cause of inflation on the pandemic disruptions from 3 years ago, then why are we still seeing the consumer price index increasing at 0.2% in July 2024?  Are you telling people just not to trust your lying eyes when they go to the grocery today?

"The vice president instead opted for a less forthright route: Blaming big business."  Aw no!  Isn't that a shame?  Poor big business with their record-setting profits and stock market.

"She vowed to go after 'price gouging' by grocery stores, landlords, pharmaceutical companies and other supposed corporate perpetrators by having the Federal Trade Commission enforce a vaguely defined 'federal ban on price gouging'".  There are, in fact, quite specific blueprints of what such a federal ban would look like.  What WaPo should say, if they were honest here, is that they are not in favor of such legislation.

"Never mind that many stores are currently slashing prices in response to renewed consumer bargain hunting."  You know what?  I think that will never enter my mind.  Again with the "lying eyes".

"Ms. Harris says she’ll target companies that make 'excessive' profits, whatever that means."  Allow me to help.

"It’s hard to see how groceries, a notoriously low-margin business, would qualify".  Haha.  Yeah, we all know that the meat and dairy industries are notoriously low-profit.  Who the fuck do they think they're talking to?  Kroger had net earnings nearly a billion dollars in one quarter, the first of 2023, smack in the middle of the inflation cycle.  Wal-Mart, who are now also a major grocerer - "Saw net income increase by $163 million in the company’s 2022 fiscal year to over $13.6 billion; Shareholder payouts grew by $7.2 billion, to nearly $16 billion in 2022; Planned to spend at least $10 billion on stock buybacks in fiscal 2023".  Costco, a bulk grocer: "Posted record-breaking $5 billion in net income; Boosted shareholder payouts by more than $4.5 billion to over $6.2 billion; Continues to see spikes in profits after earning $1.2 billion in net income in the second quarter of fiscal 2022, up $348 million from the previous year".  Other major companies for grocery products: "During one three-month period in 2022, Nestle hiked prices 9.5% and Procter & Gamble raised them 9%"; "Coca-Cola bumped up prices by 11% in 2022, and Kraft Heinz notched a more than 15% price hike"; "As Tyson Foods reported surging profits in May 2022, its CEO told reporters the company was 'asking customers to pay for inflation'".

On the child tax credit, WaPo is more sympathetic, with a caveat, "assuming it’s designed with appropriate work incentives".  Liberal media, my ass.  This is a straight-up well-worn Republican talking point.

On taxes, "she insisted in her speech that she would hold to President Joe Biden’s pledge not to raise taxes on any household earning $400,000 or less annually. That excludes 80 percent of taxable income, and does not take into account the recent surge in families earning over $400,000."  They're having some fun with the numbers, so I'll give it a try.  People who make up to or less than $400K in America account for 98% of the population.  The fact that the top 2% make "20% of taxable income" is itself a damning indictment of wealth inequality.  It sounds a lot less scary when you say, "Kamala Harris will not raise taxes on 98% of Americans" though, doesn't it?

"The Harris campaign says it plans to raise revenue to cover these costs but did not provide specific offsets in its economic plan rollout. Without them, Ms. Harris’s full plan would add $1.7 trillion to federal deficits over a decade, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan budget watchdog."  This is simply dishonest.  Harris' revenue plan is clear, to allow the 2017 Trump tax cuts to expire for everyone except the $400K and under bracket, allowing the corporate tax rate to increase from 21% to 28% (which is still less than it was under Obama) and higher tax margins for millionaires and billionaires - you know, in a progressive scale.  It's also dishonest to describe the CRFB as "nonpartisan".  Yes, there are some pro-business neoliberal Democrats who agree with the agenda of that group, but ultimately the CRFB's agenda is to promote tax cuts and slashing social spending, which should have been disclosed in this op-ed for full clarity.  CRFB's analysis isn't exactly honest either, because their figure of $1.7 trillion doesn't take into account the additional revenue from the expired tax cuts.  It also conveniently ignores that the Congressional Budget Office - a truly nonpartisan government watchdog agency - has already calculated that the Trump Tax Cuts, if renewed in full with no revenue offsets, would add $3.3 trillion over the same time period, and with $467 billion in interest alone.  Does anyone here actually believe that this WaPo Editorial Board was incapable of looking up these statistics?  Of do you think they may have cherry-picked the numbers that make Harris' plan look the worst?

That's just fack-checking the horseshit that these WaPo shills tried to use in their defense.  It doesn't even begin to touch upon everything they simply omitted which doesn't support their case.  The overall thesis of these WaPo op-eds, and the dogma being repeated by those reporting on them (for example Martha Radditz this morning on ABC) is that price-gouging is simply not a cause for inflation.  On what authority can they make this assertion?  The best I can tell is that there was a recent report issued by the Federal Reserve of San Francisco which tried to make the case, although it also includes a number of logical errors.  Semantically, they refer to price increases as "markups" and claim "markups across the entire spectrum of U.S. goods and services have been relatively flat during the post-pandemic recovery".  So...there's no inflation?  Again, we can see the markups.  For what it's worth, the Federal Reserve of Kansas City, using the same markup metrics, came to a different conclusion, "We show that markup growth likely contributed more than 50 percent to inflation in 2021, a substantially higher contribution than during the preceding decade", and even quoted Richard Reich: "When corporations are so flush with cash, why are they raising prices?  They are not raising prices solely because of the increasing costs of supplies and components and of labor.... Corporations enjoying record profits in a healthy competitive economy would absorb these costs. Why? Because they can. And they can because they don’t face meaningful competition."

There are a number of other industry reports which support the allegation of grredflation, including the Institute for Public Policy Reseach and Coomon Wealth; the University of Massachusettes Amherst; the Economic Policy Institute; the Groundwork Collaborative.

So, again, at the very very least, the issue of the cause of inflation remains debatable, and to add further to the debate might be the minor matter that the FTC has already published the result of their investigation earlier this year which lands firmly on the side of greedflation.  I've already written about this report in this thread when it came out:

What the report says isn't surprising.  It still uses the jargon that we've heard over the past couple of years - "margin expansion", "mark-up growth", phrases which skip words like "profits" and "prices" for their respective context.  Also, we hear of the "seller's inflation": "deriving from the ability of firms with a lot of market power in concentrated industries to simply raise their prices".  This is significant to distinguish this inflation from the kind of wage-driven inflation from the late 1970s, which remains the model form of inflation and justification for our policies of combating inflation (ie, the "Volcker Shock") leading the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates.  And even though it's now understood that profits rather than wages are driving this inflation, the Fed is refusing to lower interest rates despite the fact that this inflation doesn't conform to the inflationary model that Volcker was addressing.  (The Fed has also admitted that it has no idea why unemployment has remained so low and productivity so high during this inflation, both of which contradict Volcker-era economic presumptions.)

The FTC report is clear on its indictment of "greedflation", that the pandemic-era crunch on supply chains did not cause inflation, nor did the cash infusion from the Covid economic stimulus, but that these corporations, specifically the grocers, used the pandemic as "an opportunity" to raise prices.  The kindest excuse given is that these companies feared an eventual economic collapse and were pre-emptively fortifying their portfolios.  This excuse has no resonance today, after we've seen two business quarters with all-time record setting corporate profits ("Adjusted profits after taxes hit a record high of $2.8 trillion, beating the record of $2.7 trillion in the third quarter of 2022) within the time frame of this current inflation.

Other stark observations: "The FTC report examining US grocery supply chains finds that dominant firms used this moment to come out ahead at the expense of their competitors and the communities they serve", "Some firms seem to have used rising costs as an opportunity to further hike prices to increase their profits, and profits remain elevated even as supply chain pressures have eased",  "This profit trend casts doubt on assertions that rising prices at the grocery store are simply moving in lockstep with retailers’ own rising costs".

The layman USAToday article is more succinct: "Large grocery store chains exploited product shortages during the pandemic by raising prices significantly more than needed to cover their added costs and they continue to reap excessive profits."  "The grocery giants also used their marketing power and leverage to widen their advantage over smaller competitors...dominant firms used this moment to come out ahead at the expense of their competitors and the communities they serve."

Grocery retailer profits rose & remain elevated: Food and beverage retailer revenues increased to more than 6% over total costs in 2021, higher than their most recent peak in 2015 of 5.6%. In the first three-quarters of 2023, retailer profits rose even more, with revenue reaching 7% over total costs, casting doubt on the assertions of some companies that rising prices at the grocery store are the result of retailers’ own rising costs.

Should it be a little disturbing that an official Federal Trade Commission report has been completely ignored by the mainstream media in their coverage of inflation?  The context to me seems quite clear.  Just as the FTC's Lina Khan is under attack by corporate America and billionaire donors, even Democratic ones, this attempted leverage also applies to Kamala Harris.  Just as corporations and donors are warning Harris about the political price of keeping Khan in her regulatory place, this WaPo op-ed is another similar warning on behalf of the same corporations and billionaires not to fuck with their money.  However Harris decides to deal with that is up to her, but any cognizant Americans left in this country need to wake up and understand precisely what's going on here..

 

Tonight's debate was pretty ho-hum, and maybe that's a good thing.  The problem going forward will be that since the news media didn't get any real "sparks" that they can turn into this week's drama, they'll end up deeming the debate a failure and swiftly forget it (although now they have Swift to glom onto, fwiw).

On a more optimistic note, I hope that there is some attempt at parsing the substance of both candidates - Trump's lies and complete absence of policy commitments outside of his usual empty sales pitch; and Kamala's policies, which she thankfully leaned into, and thankfully she does not appear to have been intimidated by the more centrist pushes on her to abandon her calls against price-gouging and higher taxes on the wealthy (most recently by the allegedly impartial pollster Nate Silver, who openly complained that Harris was "too liberal" and "limited by progressive policy").  If determined on substance alone, clearly Harris dominated the night.

But that's never been Trump's agenda.  Trump supporters have never favored him on policy, but on his shamelessness, so I imagine that they felt he really "pwn'd" the evening by being his typical stubborn self, even if he was hesitant to go full beast-mode with his racism and misogyny (although the outright slander about Haitians eating people's cats should satisfy most racists' appetite).  If the news media can be bothered to not only fact-check Trump's claims, and not just shrug it off as "Trump being Trump", but also emphasize how depraved his lies are, steeped as they are in racism and xenophobia and the absolute basest instincts of his very basic base, then maybe there can be some real resonance from toniight's performance.
 

I'm mentioned elsewhere recently my disdain for this website publication called Splinter.  I hadn't been familiar with it until I noticed it was one of the sister-sites of Paste, the company who recently took in AV Club and Jezebel.  Splinter might be worse than both of them.  I suppose the site imagines itself as some sort of hard-core rabble-rouser.  It's tagline is "The Truth Hurts" or something.  But it's basically just more dumbass student debters trying to make a living off their poor sociology educations.

As you may be aware, we're currently standing at about 30+ odd days out from the election, and, although, mainly given our antiquated electoral college map (we might very well see another popular vote winner end up losing), the election remains frustratingly tight, although there's definitely been more signs of optimism in the past two months.  So the question is crucial: what can we do in these weeks to round the final lap?

On the scale of Monty Python-esque idiocy, the answer from Splinter is in their recent headline "Impeach Joe Biden".  Good idea.  Excellent plan.

My hope is that they might accidentally burn down their office space in a molotov mishap. 
 

So, Joe Biden has advanced prostate cancer that has metastasized to his bone marrow. Poor guy. What an unfair and cruel end to this man's story.

And yet the maligning and speculation in media and politics continues unabated. Ever since last April, when it became clear he was on the mental decline, and now with this news that he's not long for this world, has anybody, anybody in the media bothered to say, "Poor Biden?" 

No? Everyone's so busy spinning their politically–motivated narratives about one of the few presidents and former members of Congress who came from humble beginnings and spent his life making verifiable efforts on behalf of average working Americans, only to reach this ill–timed tragic end, clearing the way for a tyrannical demagogue to return to power, nobody can even pay a modicum of lip–service to what a sad turn of fate this is?

Or how about even a nod to the millions of people who suffer the unbearably cruel effects of dementia, not to mention terminal cancer? Even at a time when that massive demographic the "Baby Boomer" generation has been experiencing firsthand what it's like to watch their parents deteriorate into that merciless madness, becoming unrecognizable strangers to them, sometimes for years, often without caregivers, forced to do that impossible job on their own, experiencing such a variety of agonies I could write forever describing them all, enduring them relentlessly on a day–to–day basis with no end in sight... not a word?

...and all of those aging "boomers" witnessing in their parents' slow decline what might very well be their own fate not so long from now, many already having buried their own friends and loved ones who have succumbed to cancer, or a myriad of other terminal ailments. 

"Death, a necessary end" comes for us all, yes, but what a particularly cruel end is dementia. Unrelenting, prolonged, alienating, terrifying... can no one speak of this? Not until after he's dead, maybe? Even then, will it even be spoken of? Or will it be more political posturing? More accusations, more suspicions, speculations, more public maligning of his grieving family? Am I now committing the same sin of politicizing the tragedy, even more so as I note the timing of this sad turn of fate coinciding with the current de–funding of cancer research? Then let me check myself. 

Because, Poor Joe. To have his mind suddenly melt away, not to mention in such humiliating fashion as the world watches it happen, descending into infantile helplessness, and to watch his family so publicly maligned as he disappears into the terrifying disorientation of insanity, eventually unable to feel their closeness no matter how physically near his side they remain, unable to even recognize them. And to leave his country as it now stands, under the looming shadow of a fascistic nightmare, at the mercy of a demagogue and his army of gullible minions unopposed, that this will be the last thing he sees, after all his efforts to preserve it.

And all this is not to mention the intense physical pain of bone marrow cancer, the only potential relief from which, though not guaranteed, being ungodly levels of opiates only hospice is authorized to administer, "snowed" to use hospice terminology, snowed into oblivion, thus further distanced from his closest family, his children and grandchildren...

Poor Biden, man. Poor fucking guy. What an unfair and cruel end.


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Last edited by Rampop II (5/21/2025 1:08 pm)