“You need a bad guy to point at”
If you ever wondered what it would be like to live through a mass insanity, look around. Same with a global pandemic. But insanity and COVID-19 are not the only pandemics out there. There is also a pandemic of lies, greed, and corruption, both corporate and otherwise.
“Going forward, it should be considered political malpractice for Democrats to allow any conversation about inflation that’s not centered on the role of corporate profiteering,” MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan said in his commentary Sunday evening. The data is out there.
Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) in one of her now-signature interrogations of corporate misbehavior brought out a chart last week in questioning Mike Konczal, director of Macroeconomic Analysis at the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank. Her chart displayed the components of recent inflation based on data from the Economic Policy Institute.
Porter: According to this chart, what is the biggest driver of inflation during this pandemic… during this recent period?
Konczal: It would be corporate profits.
Porter: And what is that percentage?
Konczal: It is 54% and that number does stay that high if you update that to more recent numbers as well.
NBC station KPNX Phoenix fact-checked those numbers and concluded:
Unless new data is presented to dispute The Economic Policy Institute and the Roosevelt Institute, there are reliable indications that a large portion of price increases are going to profits for large corporations in services like groceries, furniture and cars.
Porter, says Hasan, recognizes “in politics you need a villain. You need a bad guy to point at. Republicans understand this.” And Democrats? Not so much.
Bad guys aplenty
Cheerleading the economic rape of the innocent and the further concentration of wealth among the elite few are the ever-wrong economic “experts” among conservatives in government and the economic press. These snake oil salesmen have a cure for whatever ails ya: tax cuts. But you knew that.
Trickle down economics, observes venture capitalist Nick Hanauer, “is a protection racket for the rich, masquerading as economics. These lying charlatans are wrong and have always been wrong.”
The Daily Show assembled a blooper reel of men (it’s always mainly men) cheerleading policies by outgoing British prime minister and Thatcherite Liz Truss that swiftly brought the pound and her country’s economy to its knees.
Lies or ignorance? Does it matter?
Other lies? Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) tells Mark Levin (no, I’m not linking to it) that the FBI search for stolen documents at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort was a fishing expedition by the Biden Department of Justice. “Every former President has taken documents from his administration,” Cruz said. Obama, Clinton, George W. Bush.
Except their administration’s records are controlled by and access is under the supervision of the National Archives and Records Administration. Trump just took them home and refused to return them when asked repeatedly.
Cruz is lying, one of many Republicans and fellow travelers trafficking in lies as a matter of course. The lying is as epidemic as it is dangerous.
If you missed, “60 Minutes” Sunday night, here is a taste of what the Trump cult’s shameless trafficking in lies about the 2020 election has wrought.
It’s a chilling 13-1/2 minutes. There is already blood on the cult’s hands. Stochastic terrorists threaten to spill more. Armed, right-wing militia types are prepared to do worse in service to conservative elites who have no use for them save as political shock troops and cannon fodder.
These are perilous times.