The Russian invasion shines light on global ideological splits

An interesting opinion piece the New York Times published raises the question of whether the West is playing into Putin's hands by solidifying an image of clashing cultures. This is worth at least considering. The NYT writes:

Putin Wants a Clash of Civilizations. Is ‘The West’ Falling for It?

Russia’s invasion has also provided the geopolitical equivalent of CPR for NATO. Washington’s perennial requests that Europeans pay their share for the security organization that defends them has been met with an unprecedented vote in Germany to increase its country’s military budget and its contribution to the alliance. ....

The unification in Europe that Mr. Biden speaks of is certainly real, but in a cruel paradox, European cohesion appears achievable only by further binding itself to the mast of American power and prerogatives. The idea of a geopolitically autonomous Europe acting independently of the United States — a vision historically dear to the French — is rapidly becoming unutterable. .... 

As former Warsaw Pact countries welcomed NATO expansion, he [Putin] shifted to a more civilizational understanding of Russia’s place in the world, one based on “Eastern” values: the Orthodox Church, patriarchal chauvinism, anti-homosexuality edicts, as well as a notion of a greater ethnic Russian identity whose ancient wellspring is inconveniently Kyiv, Ukraine. Protesters such as Pussy Riot and others who struck directly at this neo-civilizational image came in for swift retribution.

Mr. Putin’s turn reflected a broader phenomenon of authoritarian-led liberalizing economies trying to fill an empty ideological space that seemed poised to be filled by Western idolatry. In China, too, in the late 2000s, there was a turn to a civilizational understanding in Beijing, where dutiful readers of Mr. Huntington have spread notions of Chinese civilization in the forms of global Confucius Institutes or a program for “cultural self-confidence,” and which President Xi Jinping today expresses in his elliptical “thought.”

Turkey, too, under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has pushed a vision of a neo-Ottoman sphere stretching from North Africa to Central Asia, which is a direct repudiation of Ataturk’s more bounded vision of Turkish nationalism. More recently, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India has revived ideas about Hindu supremacy, glorifying his nation’s ancient past — Hindustan is his Kyivan Rus — and using it as a bludgeon against his opponents. The turn to civilizational imagining provides a useful lever for ruling elites who want to suppress other forms of solidarity, whether class, regional or ecologically based, and to restrict the attractions of cosmopolitanism for their economic elites. 

For all the talk about how Ukraine is — despite whatever losses on the battlefield — winning the P.R. war, there is a sense in which Mr. Putin has already won at another level of framing the conflict. The more we hear about the resolve of the West, the more the values of a liberal international order appear like the provincial set of principles of a particular people, in a particular place.

Of the 10 most-populous countries in the world, only one — the United States — supports major economic sanctions against Russia. Indonesia, Nigeria, India and Brazil have all condemned the Russian invasion, but they do not seem prepared to follow the West in its preferred countermeasures. Nor do non-Western states appear to welcome the kind of economic disruptions that will result from, as Senator Rob Portman phrased it, “putting a noose on the Putin economy.” North Africa and the Middle East rely on Russia for basics from fertilizer to wheat; Central Asian populations rely on its remittances. Major disruptions to these economic networks seem unlikely to relieve Ukrainian suffering.  

Mr. Putin himself came to power atop the rubble of Russia’s 1990s economic chaos. It would be rash to think that out of the new economic chaos inflicted, a phoenix to the liking of the West will rise.

That vision of clashing civilizations feels like it has significant grounding in reality. Some others suspect that Putin's agenda is deeper than just obliterating Ukraine.[1] If so, it raises the question of what should we do differently, if anything? Maybe it is true that Russia will never culturally integrate with the West.

Footnote: 

1. An interview with Russian journalist Masha Gessen got the title, Putin Is ‘Profoundly Anti-Modern.’ Masha Gessen Explains What That Means for the World. The transcript is here. It includes this:

And as of today [March 10], the two polls I’ve seen out of Russia found majority support for the war in Ukraine. But the question that raises is what are Russians supporting? What do they know of the war being waged in their name by their government? Do they even know it’s war? The Russian government does not call it a war. It’s a special military operation.

And under a new law, to say anything that Putin’s government thinks is false about his war in Ukraine is punishable by up to 15 years in prison. He’s wiping out independent news operations. He’s tightening access to social media. This is a country that already was filled with propaganda where information and untruth were in an unusually intense competition and information is being choked off that much more and that much more rapidly.  

The state narrative is already that — and, in fact, it has been the narrative since at least 2014, since the sanctions imposed on Russia for its first invasion of Crimea — the narrative has been the West is waging an economic offensive against Russia, an unmotivated, unprovoked economic offensive, which makes sense because it’s always us against the world. It’s always as against the West. And the West is just doing the thing that it does, which is wage war against Russia.

The idea that sanctions could possibly change Putin’s behavior, or motivate the elites or the masses to coalesce and protest and overthrow Putin is wrong. It is demonstrably wrong. It’s been tried over and over and it doesn’t work. Now, obviously we’ve never seen sanctions on this scale and it is mind-boggling.

Texas is really messed up

Some Biblical guidance for Christian nationalists

Indeed, there is not a righteous man on earth who continually does good and who never sins (Ecclesiastes 7:20); All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23); No one who is born of God sins; but He who was born of God keeps him, and the evil one does not touch him (1 John 5:18; 1 John 3:6, 3:9)

No one has ever seen God (1 John 4:12); No man has seen or can see [God] (1 Timothy 6:16); The Lord appeared to Abraham near the great trees of Mamre while he was sitting at the entrance to his tent in the heat of the day (Genesis 18:1); The Lord would speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend (Exodus 33:11)

Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. (Matthew 5:17–18); The days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and with the people of Judah. (see Hebrews 8:6–13)

For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast (Ephesians 2:8–9); We maintain that a person is justified by faith apart from the works of the law (Romans 3:28); Will [God] not repay everyone according to what they have done? (Proverbs 24:12); What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? (James 2:14); For the Son of Man is going to come in his Father’s glory with his angels, and then he will reward each person according to what they have done (Matthew 16:27)

The mess in Texas

No one needs to mess with Texas. It has royally messed itself up. The news coming out of that state is beyond bizarre. At present the toxic influence of the Republican Party there is more a matter of hyper-radical Christian nationalism (CN) rampaging against civil liberties than it is ultra-wealthy radical right laissez-faire capitalists rampaging for more power and wealth and less government and taxes. Radical CN social engineering, call it Christian Sharia, is what CN is inflicting on Texas right now. It is what CN ideology and politics want to do to all of America. This stuff is terrifying.

One New York Times article makes clear the intense hate and cruelty that sacred, infallible CN fundamentalism holds against the LGBQT community. The NYT writes in an article entitled, Texas Court Halts Abuse Inquiries Into Parents of Transgender Children:

A judge said the governor’s order to consider medically accepted treatments for transgender youth as abuse had been improperly adopted and violated the State Constitution.

Investigations of parents with transgender children for possible child abuse were temporarily halted across Texas on Friday after a state court ruled that the policy, ordered last month by Gov. Greg Abbott, had been improperly adopted and violated the State Constitution.

The injunction, issued by Judge Amy Clark Meachum in Travis County, stemmed from a legal challenge by the parents of a 16-year-old transgender girl. Her family was among the first to be investigated by the state’s Department of Family and Protective Services under Mr. Abbott’s order, which directed state officials to consider medically accepted treatments for transgender youth — including hormones and puberty-suppressing drugs — as abuse.

CN ideologues hate non-heterosexuality so much that they consider it child abuse to medically support accepted treatments. Here, God has intervened in modern medicine. God crushed science to vindicate the religious beliefs that infallible self-righteous of CN adherents hold. Christian Sharia is above man-made law, including the US Constitution. That is a cherished CN dream. It is starting to come true in radical right states where CN is powerful enough to pass such awful laws.

In another display of the power of fundamentalist CN dogma on law, CN legislators may have figured out a way to pass laws that, for the most part, courts cannot examine for constitutionality. If this legal tactic works, the floodgates of CN discrimination and bigotry will open and remain unchecked as long as this CN tactic is held by courts to be legal. The NYT writes in an article entitled Texas Supreme Court Shuts Down Final Challenge to Abortion Law: 

The ruling says state officials have no authority to enforce the law, which empowers private citizens: “We cannot rewrite the statute.”

The Texas Supreme Court on Friday effectively shut down a federal challenge to the state’s novel and controversial ban on abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy, closing off what abortion rights advocates said was their last, narrow path to blocking the new law.

The Texas law, which several states are attempting to copy, puts enforcement in the hands of civilians. It offers the prospect of $10,000 rewards for successful lawsuits against anyone — from an Uber driver to a doctor — who “aids or abets” a woman who gets an abortion once fetal cardiac activity can be detected.

By empowering everyday people and expressly banning enforcement by state officials, the law, known as S.B. 8, was designed to escape judicial review in federal court. Advocates of abortion rights had asked the Supreme Court to block it even before it took effect last September. The justices repeatedly declined, and said that because state officials were not responsible for enforcing the law it could not be challenged in federal court based on the constitutional protections established by Roe.  

Abortion rights supporters and legal scholars said the Texas law would encourage other states not only to pass similar bans on abortion, but to attempt to nullify other precedents they oppose.

It is not rocket science to see where this legal tactic is going. Once the tactic to evade courts is established for abortion, which is just one of the civil liberties that CN ideologues hate, the path is clear to do the same for other things they hate. Unfortunately, CN fundamentalists hate some important things that most Americans like. This isn't just about abortion. It is also about voting rights, gun rights, LGBQT rights, secularism, especially including secular public schools and education, pluralism (CN ideology is rigidly and radically White-centric and male dominated), obliterating what little is left of church-state separation, getting unfettered access to tax dollars to fund CN churches, schools and businesses, etc. What CN hates and will get rid of if allowed to includes some important things that most Americans support.  

That raises one last point that needs to be mentioned. Another aspect of CN fundamentalism and its dogma is its demand for loyalty and submission. It is inherently authoritarian and anti-democratic. CN fits easily and comfortably with the rising American fascism that the Republican Party now mostly openly supports. In this regard, elite CN fundamentalist radicals are comfortable and heavily overlapping with elite laissez-faire capitalists and their lust for completely unfettered markets, zero social responsibility and infinite profits come hell or high water. Contrary public opinion is of no concern to either the CN radicals or the capitalist radicals. For them, it is all about accumulating power and wealth and shutting people up if they do not like or support what the elites demand for all of us.

If there was such a thing, what is going on in the Republican Party today would be an unholy marriage made in hell.

Update on Republican election subversion efforts

Poor Harris County Elections Administrator Isabel Longoria: she resigns  

after being caught in a crapstorm of Republican election crap

This mess comes to us from Texas. I did not mess with Texas. It messed with itself. 

It is starting to look like the Republican push to subvert elections is beginning to bear the toxic fruit it was intended to bear. The Washington Post writes in an article, A Texas county didn’t count 10,000 ballots. Now the parties are at war over who’s to blame:

Advocates say the problems in Harris County reveal that a weakened system can’t be fixed by divided parties. 

Voting machines failed to power up. Poll workers handed out the wrong-size ballots. Optical scanners rejected hundreds of votes.

And then, as if enough hadn’t gone wrong during the March 1 primary in Harris County, Tex., a weary election worker who had been on the job for at least 30 hours neglected to include about 10,000 of the roughly 360,000 total votes in an unofficial tally published a day after polls had closed.

One week later, there’s one thing everyone agrees on: The primary was an error-riddled disaster. Isabel Longoria, the county’s top elections official, tendered her resignation this week and declared, “We lost the faith of the voters.”

What Republicans and Democrats in the nation’s third most-populous county don’t agree on, however, is exactly what went wrong or what to do about it. Republicans are suing and demanding that the state take over the Democratic-controlled elections office. Democrats say the problem is a new law enacted by Republicans that made it harder to vote by mail and criminalized election mistakes.

The result, in Harris County at least, is new evidence of a weakened system too fragile to withstand the everyday glitches and mistakes of running an election in a state where the parties are too deeply divided to fix those problems together. That worries voting advocates, who fear a worst-case scenario in which a majority of Americans simply don’t trust the outcome of elections anymore.

“Politicizing our elections weakens faith in our democracy,” said Chris Hollins, a Democrat who ran elections in Harris County in 2020 and is now running to be Houston mayor. “Instead of saying, ‘Great, the process works,’ the response is, ‘Look what happens when Democrats run a city.’ Or, ‘Look what happens when they change this law.’”

The whole point of  Republican efforts of calling previously free and fair elections fraudulent and illegitimate is to weaken faith in elections and democracy. The ex-president started that Republican Party bullshit train before the 2016 election and ramped it way up after the 2020 election. The Republican argument is simple and easy to understand: The only way a Republican can lose an election is if it was fraudulent and illegitimate.

Looks like disputes over elections are going to get worse and not going to go away. November of 2022 is shaping up to be a 

of conflict and finger pointing, maybe so bad it amounts to a 

where voters, elections and democracy get

 .

Questions: Who gets most of the credit or blame here, Republicans or Democrats, or is this just a Texas kerfuffle of no importance? Do new, complicated Republican laws factor in at all or are they relevant and important?

The stakes in sanctions against Russia: Nationalize Western assets in Russia

The stakes are increasing. The world is entering uncharted waters in the middle of a powerful storm. The New York Times writes:

Besieged by an onslaught of sanctions that have largely undone 30 years of economic integration with the West in the space of two weeks, President Vladimir V. Putin on Thursday opened the door to nationalizing the assets of Western companies pulling out of Russia and exhorted senior officials to “act decisively” to preserve jobs.

With Russia in danger of defaulting on its sovereign debt and facing a sharp contraction in its economy, the West is betting that the looming, generation-defining economic crisis could make Russians turn on their president. It is also possible, however, that the crisis could end up strengthening Mr. Putin, validating his narrative that the West is determined to destroy Russia.

“I have no doubt that these sanctions would have been implemented no matter what,” Mr. Putin said in televised remarks on Thursday, arguing that his intervention in Ukraine served merely as a pretext for the West to try to wreck Russia’s economy. “Just as we overcame these difficulties in years past, we will overcome them now, too.”

But the sanctions imposed in the two weeks since the invasion — combined with multinational companies that employ tens of thousands of Russians voluntarily deciding to withdraw amid the global outrage — dwarf any other economic pressure that Russia has faced under Mr. Putin.

With the ruble having lost nearly half its value in the last month, prices of basic goods have risen sharply, causing panic buying at supermarkets. The central bank, which has kept the Moscow stock exchange closed since the war began, has introduced new capital controls, preventing companies from withdrawing more than $5,000 in cash for the next six months.

“This will be a gigantic, transformational downturn,” said Ruben Enikolopov, rector of the New Economic School in Moscow.

The Institute of International Finance, a Washington-based association of financial firms, predicted that Russia would see a 15-percent decline in its gross domestic product this year, which would wipe out much of the economic growth that Mr. Putin has presided over since taking office in 1999.

And things could get even worse. Further escalation of the war could lead more countries to refuse to buy Russian energy, the institute’s economists said, “which would drastically impair Russia’s ability to import goods and services, deepening the recession.”

The alarm with which Russian planners view the downturn is reflected in the radical measures they have proposed to arrest it.

Of particular concern are Western companies that once symbolized post-Soviet Russia’s integration into the world economy, like McDonald’s and Ikea, that have now shuttered hundreds of stores and factories. Mr. Putin told officials in the televised meeting that the assets of such companies should be put under “external management” and then transferred “to those who want to work.”

Dmitri A. Medvedev, the vice chairman of Mr. Putin’s security council, said the Kremlin could respond to Western companies leaving the Russian market with the seizure of their assets “and their possible nationalization.”  

The risk for the West, some warned, is that the crushing sanctions could spark a backlash.

“The medicine could turn out to be worse than the illness, even from the point of view of declared goals,” Mr. Enikolopov said, arguing that the sanctions could end up entrenching anti-Western views. “No one is looking at the collateral damage at all.”

On the shore of western Russia’s Lake Valdai, Tatyana Makarova, an entrepreneur, said that she supported Mr. Putin’s war in Ukraine — and that the impact of the sanctions only shows that Russia has been excessively dependent on the West. Ms. Makarova, who owns a small cleaning company, said in a phone interview that she believed the economic crisis would finally force Russia to develop homegrown technology. ​​ 

“Perhaps this will be good for us,” she said. “This will wake Russians up, and thank God.”  

Timofey Bordachev, a prominent political analyst, wrote that the new “Iron Curtain now descending between the West and Russia” offered the country “an absolutely fantastic chance to start a more meaningful and independent life.”

Multiple thoughts come to mind.

One is that the West has committed a colossal mistake by remaining reliant on carbon energy. Europe needs Russian oil and gas. For at least the last ~20 years, the Europeans and Americans should have been building nuclear power plants as fast as they could. Not only do we face an environmental disaster, we also face blackmail by tyrants with oil or natural gas. On both environmental and national security grounds, Western politics has failed miserably. 

And, just like some Russians believe that Russia should not have let itself become dependent on the West, The West should not have remained dependent on Russia energy.

Another is that nationalization of Western assets in Russia makes sense. Putin and Russian elites run an autocratic kleptocracy. Stealing Western assets is perfectly reasonable to a kleptocrat who thinks they can get away with the theft with an acceptable cost-benefit outcome.

Also the matter of the Russian people is important. Will they turn toward or away from Putin and his kleptocratic police state? People in a nation under siege as Russia now is tend to rally around the flag and the leader, even a brutal, corrupt tyrant like Putin. At present, all the Russia people get to hear is an endless stream of lies about poor, innocent Russia being brutally attacked by those evil Western fascist countries. The entire Russian nation is one gigantic echo chamber. Only Putin speaks in it. There is no war in Ukraine, just an innocent little 'special military operation' to stop Ukrainian fascists from slaughtering innocent, defenseless pro-Russian Ukrainians.

Maybe this is, as Mr. Bordachev says, an absolutely fantastic chance to start a more meaningful and independent life.

Assuming we don't self-annihilate, if this conflict wakes the West up perhaps it will be good for most people. And thank God if it does wake us up. Unfortunately, there is no way this will be any good for Ukraine any time soon. They're royally hosed. The West needs to build a (sanctions) wall and make Russia pay for who they murdered and injured and to fix what they broke.

One can also hope that if waking up does happen in the West, it will make the threat of China clearer. China is an even deadlier threat to the global economy, democracy, truth and the rule of law than Russia. Both are about equally deadly in terms of nuclear weapons.

Regarding the attempt to overthrow the US government on 1/6

The Guardian reports that attempts by the ex-president and allied Republican elites knew they were breaking laws in their attempt to overthrow the US government on 1/6. The Guardian writes:

Interrupting the certification of Joe Biden’s election win on 6 January last year as part of the scheme to return Donald Trump to office was known to be unlawful by at least one of the former president’s lawyers, according to an email exchange about the potential conspiracy.

The former Trump lawyer John Eastman – who helped coordinate the scheme from the Trump “war room” at the Willard hotel in Washington – conceded in an email to counsel for then vice-president Mike Pence, Greg Jacob, that the plan was a violation of the Electoral Count Act.

But Eastman then urged Pence to move ahead with the scheme anyway, pressuring the former vice-president’s counsel to consider supporting the effort on the basis that it was only a “minor violation” of the statute that governed the certification procedure.

The admission that the scheme was unlawful undercuts arguments by Eastman and the Willard war room team that they believed there was no wrongdoing in seeking to have Pence delay the certification past 6 January – one of the strategies they sought to return Trump to power.

It additionally raises the prospect that the other members of the Willard war room – including Trump’s former attorney Rudy Giuliani and Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon – were also aware that the scheme to delay or stop the certification was unlawful from the start.

The request to adjourn the joint session was one of several strategies Eastman had laid out in an infamous memo presented to Trump, Pence and top aides last year that outlined how the former vice-president could attempt to unilaterally overturn the 2020 election results.

The strategy to delay the joint session past 6 January was about buying time for Trump and his team to pressure state legislatures to send Trump slates of electors to Congress on the basis that the Biden slates were illegitimate because of supposed election fraud.

The email exchange – revealed in court filings by the select committee last week – shows Eastman attempted to take advantage of the fact that the Electoral Count Act was not followed exactly in the immediate aftermath of the Capitol attack to try and benefit Trump.

“The Senate and House have both violated the Electoral Count Act this evening – they debated the Arizona objections for more than two hours. Violation of 3 USC 17,” Eastman wrote to Jacob in his 9.44pm email, referring to the statute in the US criminal code.

But in the second part of his email, Eastman claimed that because the statute had already been violated in small ways – delays that amounted to a few hours at best – Pence should have no problem committing “one more minor violation and adjourn for 10 days”.

That admission is significant since it demonstrates Eastman knew the scheme to delay Biden’s certification was unlawful – which the select committee believes bolsters its case that he was involved in a conspiracy to defraud the United States and obstruct Congress.

This disclosure of crime arguably puts Biden and Merrick Garland in an uncomfortable position. They do not want to prosecute the ex-president or the criminals who planned and tried to help him overthrow the government. 

The best strategy for Biden and Garland to shield the high level 1/6 traitors and criminals is to (i) say nothing about this, and (ii) repeatedly deflect attention to prosecutions of the low level degenerates, street thugs and traitors who physically attacked the capitol on 1/6. That should do the trick.

No doubt, Republicans in congress will somehow blame Biden and Democrats for 1/6. That should distract public attention and help the ex-president skirt the law to come out untouched and fighting for self-righteous revenge. Of course, defense attorneys for the ex-president and his criminal gang will use every possible trick, dodge, sleight of hand and technicality to subvert the law so that the courts find no wrongdoing. 

As we all know, when it comes to trying to overthrow the US government, small infractions of law are acceptable. But when it comes to prosecuting the traitors and thugs involved in an overthrow attempt, no miniscule infraction is tolerable. As usual, the game is rigged heavily in favor of the bad guys, neo-fascism and the rule of the thug and heavily against the good guys, democracy and the rule of law. Just politics as usual for American elites.

Biden's and Garland's legal defense strategy for the ex-president 

and his co-conspirators

Regarding inflation and corporate profits

The pandemic and supply chain disruption have damaged a lot of businesses, with many having gone bankrupt. But not all. The solidly liberal Hightower Lowdown (HL) sees corporate greed as the major factor in the inflation. The HL argument is as follows:

What the GOP bemoans as America’s inflation problem[1], is actually a corporate greed problem.

Of course, the greedmeisters and their apologists are deeply offended by this charge, huffing in outrage that their pursuit of corporate profit has not driven any price surges. In our economy of free market competition, they snap, consumer prices are established by the Holy Law of Supply and Demand. They lecture that when shortages occur, prices naturally rise, and that incentivizes additional production, which magically establishes a new supply/demand balance. Even if one producer or a monopolistic cabal of producers tries to overcharge consumers, these theoretical new competitors will draw customers from the gougers and keep prices in check. In the sanctuary of this concept, the free market is a virtuous, self-regulating circle of competitive fairness. Its zealous devotees have successfully convinced nearly all public policy makers to avoid government intrusion into its delicate mechanism.

But there’s one big problem with their virtuous circle: It’s a laissez-fairyland fraud that implodes when it hits the hard reality that our economy doesn’t remotely resemble a competitive marketplace. As the Lowdown detailed in October, nearly every economic sector in the US (from high tech to farm and food) has been locked down by a handful of overpowering corporate giants. For some 40 years, corporate-directed government policies have (1) intentionally promoted (even subsidized) mega-mergers; (2) gleefully green-lighted anticompetitive business tactics; and (3) aggressively inculcated and celebrated the economic lie that bigger is better. Thus, in short order and with practically no public awareness, much less discussion, America has been transformed into Monopoly Nation.

Brand name corporations are not being forced to markup price tags just to cover rising costs for raw materials, labor, transportation, etc. Indeed, in a competitive marketplace, they’d have to eat much of those increases by taking a bit less in profits. (The giants have been stockpiling record profits for years, so they could easily weather a downtick.) They’re now raising prices not simply to maintain exorbitant profits, but instead to squeeze even greater profits from hard-hit consumers. And then they cynically exploit the public’s worry about inflation to create more inflation.

Consider diapers, a necessity for many families. As corporate watchdog Judd Legum recently reported, the huge consumer product seller Procter & Gamble announced last April that Covid-driven production costs were forcing it to raise the price for its Pampers brand. At the time, it had just posted a quarterly profit of $3.8 billion, and P&G could easily have absorbed a temporary rise in its costs. But instead of holding the price to ease their customers’ economic pain, the conglomerate used a global health crisis to justify upping diaper prices. Six months later, P&G’s quarterly profit topped $5 billion and, in that same quarter, P&G spent $3 billion to buy back shares of its own stock–a Wall Street manipulation that artificially bloats the wealth of top execs and other big shareholders. In sum, P&G used the excuse of inflation to inflate the price of diapers, then used the extra money extracted from families to inflate the value of its stock in a ploy to further enrich its biggest shareholders. And why wouldn’t savvy consumers switch from Pampers to Huggies, the brand sold by Kimberly-Clark, P&G’s main “competitor”? Because co-monopolist Kimberly-Clark goosed up its prices at the same time. (The two companies control 80% of the global disposable diaper market.)

In 2019, the year before Covid-19 hit, big US corporations hauled in roughly a trillion dollars in profit. Only two years later, during the pandemic, they grabbed more than $1.7 trillion. Antitrust analyst Matt Stoller finds that this huge profit jump accounts for 60% of the inflation now slapping US families. The CEO of Kroger, the supermarket goliath, gloated last summer that “a little bit of inflation is always good in our business,” adding that “we’ve been very comfortable with our ability to pass on the increases” to consumers. “Comfortable” indeed. Last year, Kroger spent $1.5 billion of its monopoly profits on stock buybacks to reward executives and other big shareholders. In January, McDonald’s gushed to its shareholders that 2021 had been “a banner year.” Executives bragged that despite the supply disruptions of the pandemic and higher costs for meat and labor, they used the chain’s pricing power to up prices, thus increasing corporate profits by a stunning 59% over the previous year. And the party goes on: “We’re going to have the best growth we’ve ever had this year,” Wall Street banking titan Jamie Dimon exulted at the start of 2022. 

The same monopoly pricing power that abuses consumers can simultaneously exert “monopsony” power. While monopoly refers to a market with very few sellers, monopsony is a concentrated, non-competitive market with only a handful of dominant buyers. Monopsony empowers those few buyers to dictate prices and onerous terms of business to myriad independent sellers of components, ingredients, and services.

For a brief tutorial on monopsony, let me call in Professor Hamburger. More than any of the other price hikes in 2021, the 21% spurt in the cost of hamburger and other beef products may have jolted Americans the most. Over a few short months, a restaurant burger or a package of ground beef became noticeably pricier, and tight-budget families wondered why cattle ranchers were hitting them with such an increase.

They weren’t. In fact, back at the ranch, the hardy families that raise cattle were being slammed, too–not by price increases, but by disastrous decreases. As Prof. Hamburger explains, this double whammy is the direct result of our government’s abdication of its antitrust responsibility. Since the 1980s, state and federal politicians and regulators have blithely allowed a handful of ever-bigger meat processors to buy out or force out hundreds of feedlots and packing houses that previously competed to purchase from local cattle raisers.

Consequently, we have a BS beef economy in which producers and consumers alike are now at the tender mercies of a meat cartel: 85% of the US beef market is controlled by just four multibillion-dollar goliaths. (JBS and National Beef are Brazilian owned; Tyson Foods and Cargill Inc are US-based multinationals.) Despite already wallowing in fabulous profits, this beef cartel has been raising consumer prices during the pandemic, not to stay afloat, mind you, but to profiteer. And it’s working nicely for them. Their profit margin at the end of 2021 was 300%(!) higher than the previous year.

Meanwhile, the same monopoly that’s ripping off customers has been using its monopsony power to bankrupt the beef industry’s last competitive segment: independent cattle raisers. Not only have the Big Four eliminated local and regional cattle-buying competition, but they’ve also divided the national ranching territory, so they don’t have to bid against each other. The result is a corrupted marketing system that traps and strangles ranchers.

The New York Times recently reported, Steve Charter [discussed here], a third-generation Montana rancher, hoped for a good sale when he saw supermarket beef prices rising, so he took 120 head to an auction that delivers cattle to a JBS plant. He was told he had to commit to selling only to JBS, at a price to be dictated later by the Brazilian behemoth. “I wanted to tell him to go to hell,” Charter says, “But what choice did I have?” There were no other bidders, and cattle are expensive to keep. His break-even price was $1.30 a pound. “Without any consulting or dealing,” he says, “they just decided that they were going to pay me $1 a pound.”

Question: Setting aside its liberal bias, is HL's argument convincing that big corporation profits are significantly or mostly contributing to inflation, or is this cherry picked liberal propaganda that unreasonably distorts reality?

Footnote: The GOP is pounding on Biden and Democratic politics for current inflation. According to HL, a key GOP argument asserts that Biden lavished giveaways on millions of lazy workers, which led to slackers refusing to go to work. In turn, that lead to widespread disruptions in the global supply chain, causing shortages. That forced corporations to raise prices, and that swamps the middle class with systemic inflation. 

Assuming that HL reasonably summarizes a key Republican argument blaming Biden and the Dems, (i) it is conveniently silent about high profits for at least some giant corporations with limited competition, and (ii) it ignores the fact that global supply chain disruptions, e.g., shortage of silicon chips for electronics, have little to do with American workers refusing to take jobs. Presumably, that's why this is called global supply chain disruptions, not American supply chain disruptions.